Customer Reviews

Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

Set in rural Wisconsin, Shotgun Lovesongs tells the story of four men, and one woman, renegotiating the meaning of friendship, love and home.

Five characters share the narrative in alternating chapters. Hank – who inherited his father’s farm, Beth – Hank’s wife, Lee – an international music artist, Kip – a successful broker and Ronny -an injured rodeo star. These people speak and we think that we know them, who they are and what they dream of, but each are capable of surprising us as the story unfolds.

I have read few books that feature male friendship, and it was something that I really enjoyed about Shotgun Lovesongs. The bonds this group formed in childhood remain intact through a decade of physical separation and sporadic contact, but when they reunite in Little Wing they learn none of them are the boys they once were and their relationships with each other are now complicated by the men they have become.

The community of Little Wing in rural Wisconsin is vividly portrayed. I could easily imagine Kip’s mill looming over the town, the car park full of battered pick-ups, weathered men leaning on the bar in the VWF hall and tractors traversing the the open farmland.

While tempers may flare, the conflict in Shotgun Lovesongs is largely personal and the drama is subdued. The pace of the story is measured and thoughtful, emphasising emotion over action. I found the writing and dialogue to be simple and honest yet descriptive and affecting.

Shotgun Lovesongs is an understated yet heartfelt novel, an ode to friendship, to love and to family. It is a story about finding your way home, where ever that may be.

This book is a deceptively simple story of five friends in small town Wisconsin. Their stories are not big stories, nor are they particularly novel. Yet this book transmutes into that comfortable source of warmth that elusively beckons for us all. It is in the ordinary that transforms that the spirit emerges. The friends represent the span from a neurologically impaired rodeo star to a struggling farmer to his wife who has a secret link with the town boy made good. Lee is that folk fable of the local boy made super star, yet in his Wisconsin interactions, he becomes real. The setting includes the wilderness held wild, the failed strivings of men, and the daily settings that our characters take for granted. The prose depends on insight and presence instead of drama and hyperbole. This is a little book that makes a large impact.

This is essentially the story of four male friends, Henry (Hank), Lee, Kip and Ronny who all grew up in small town Wisconsin. They have made their own ways in life with differing degrees of success; depending on how one actually quantifies `success'. Lee has become a famous musician whose debut album gives us the title of this book. Ronnie became a rodeo star with a drink problem, Kip went off to the big city to make money trading stocks and Hank stayed at home and married his child hood sweetheart to work the farm and raise a family.

Kip comes back to get married and breathe life into the old mill which dominates the skyline and has stood derelict for many years. What starts out well soon unravels as the paparazzi turn up to see Lee in his hometown. That then acts as a catalyst for change for all the erstwhile friends; and as loyalties are tested and pasts are revisited so do the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet.

The story is told in episodic fashion with each chapter being told by a different character. In this way more of the real people are revealed each time and the misunderstandings that spawn friction are given an airing with a differing perspective to add reason to what is often questionable behaviour.

Nickolas Butler has woven a tale that gently unfolds but it still has enough immediacy to keep you turning the pages. The music seems to be in the prose too - it actually reminded me of Okkervil Rivers latest album (`The Silver Gymnasium') where Will Sheff has gone back to his hometown to revisit childhood memories. There is a lot of nostalgia here and `what `if' scenarios but all of the characters are allowed the space to grow and breathe and it is hard not to empathise with most of them. I really enjoyed this book and am not surprised that Fox Searchlight have bought the film rights, it is crying out to be made into a film and if it is half as good as the book it will still be a pleasure to see.

I thought Shotgun Loves Songs was so very Wisconsin-y that it couldn't be more authentic. Being a Wisconsinite myself, I found the characters to be likable in ways that my neighbors are. Farmers I know, working the fields dawn til dusk or sharing a cold beer with a friend in a small town bar where everyone literally knows your name is what Butler portrays to a tee. I've seen it, I've done it. But what I found most enjoyable about the book was his description of the places that are mirrored after land I grew up around. Butler is so poetic in describing the landscape that Lee loves so much and I loved that aspect of the book because I feel that same way.
" Here I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music is the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn" (pg 48) is where I spend my weekends up north. This is exactly what I feel when I stand on a frozen lake at night at our cabin in Northwoods Wisconsin. Nick hit it right on chord and there is nothing more Wisconsin than the sound of silent serenity in nature.

Butler gives us characters that are very real. He nails small-town Midwestern life, the beauty and the mundane. His male characters provide insight into friendships that wax and wane over time. The author drew me into these lives and when the story ended, I felt a little sad as I wanted to know more about them. He is a good story teller. This was one of those books that you start and read all night long.

After reading simply for entertainment for many years, I had forgotten the wonderful gift a great writer can give us. Butler's book is indeed a gift to the reader with all the raw emotion and highly developed characters reminiscent of Faulkner and Salinger. This is not just an entertaining novel...this is good literature.

Some books do a great job evoking a sense of place and a general mood, which draw you even further into them. Nickolas Butler's Shotgun Lovesongs is one such book. It's beautifully written—poetic, even—and tremendously compelling, and I read it between two short flights.

Little Wing, Wisconsin is a small rural town. Henry, Lee, Ronny, and Kip were best friends who grew up together. While Henry stayed in Little Wing to take over his father's dairy farm, Ronny found some success on the rodeo circuit before his drinking led to a brain injury following an arrest, Kip moved to Chicago to become a broker for the Mercantile Exchange, and Lee was the successful one, becoming a popular singer.

Ten years later, the friends are reunited for Kip's wedding, as he has returned to Little Wing to breathe life into the town's defunct mill. Lee agrees to sing a song at the wedding, and he finds himself caught between the magic of a new relationship with a successful actress and the desire to return home, where life is simpler. But the wedding also causes the start of some stresses among the friends, as they deal with the problems of their own lives and the envy, frustration, jealousy, and insecurity of small-town life when you've known each other forever.

The book shifts in perspective between the four friends as well as Henry's wife, Beth, who also grew up in Little Wing, and had a special connection with many of the friends. It moves back and forth through time, touching on the victories and defeats, hurts and happy times. While some characters are more engaging than others, Butler has imbued them with such life and complexity that they feel almost larger than life, and you find yourself wishing you had friends like these. While nothing out of the ordinary happens in the plot, it doesn't matter, because you become truly invested in their lives. Shotgun Lovesongs is a paean to life in small-town America, its virtues and its disadvantages. It's a book about trying to live your dreams and worrying about what to do if the dreams don't turn out the way you hoped. It's a book about how far the power of love can take you and how far the power of friendship can carry you. And Butler's use of language is so evocative and mesmerizing, but yet still simple and appropriate for the story. Here's an example:

"Strange, I thought to myself right then, how his life was like my own and yet not at all like it, though we came from the same small place on earth. And why? How had our paths diverged, why were they still even connected? Why was he then in my backyard, on my farm, the sound of almost two hundred cows, faintly in the background, mooing and lowing? How had he come back, this famous man, this person whose name everyone knew, whose voice was recognizable to millions in a way that made it impossible for him to be a stranger in so many places?"

I really loved this book and didn't want it to end. I think it would be a great movie as well, because I would love to see these characters and their stories play out in front of me again. I'd encourage you to take a trip to Little Wing, Wisconsin and spend some time with these people. Their lives might not wow you, but their stories will hook you.

I've known every character in this book. It was fun to read and hard to put down. Whether the characters were good people or capable of doing despicable things, Butler makes you care for them and want them to succeed. One of the best reads I've had in the past year.

The first few lines of a novel can pull you in or they can distance you. Nickolas Butler starts Shotgun Lovesongs with a “wow”: “We invited him to all of our weddings; he was famous. We addressed the invitations to his record company’s skyscraper in New York City so that the gaudy, gilded envelopes could be forwarded to him on tour –in Beirut, Helsinki, Tokyo. Places beyond our ken or our limited means.”

The “we” is the group of boys-turned-men from Little Wing: Ronny, the big-hearted and brain-damaged one-time rodeo rider; Kip, the boy-made-good who saved the town mill; Henry, the hard-working farmer and family man and his wife Beth. The “him” is Leland Sutton (aka Corvus), a rock star who soared to super stardom and is marrying a famous actress but who has not forgotten his roots.

“Here, I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn.” That is what “home” means to Lee (reportedly based on the frontman of the band Bon Iver) and, in fact, the lure of home is integral to the identity of each of these characters, in different ways.

There’s a poignancy and an authenticity in the telling; anyone from a small town, particularly a small Wisconsin town, can identify with these characters and can care about them, despite their foibles. The problem is that as each character narrates his/her own section, the voices become indistinguishable. And after a while, it becomes a little predictable and one-note-ish.

For the magnificently detailed sense of place, the descriptions of the small town Midwest, the celebration of male friendship, and many touching scenes, I’d recommend this book. It’s not perfect, and sometimes the scenes are too good to be true, but it’s a page-turning homage to a place called home.

I just saw a brief mention of this book in the Wisconsin State Journal on March 23 and decided to give it a try. This book is so amazing I have added to my top 10 of all time. I read 4-6 books per month and this one is an unstoppable page turner. The characters are so relatable, familiar, and interesting. I cannot wait to finish this book; however, also dread when I do so. This is definitely on my top shelf of recommended reads for all my friends, family, and anyone who reads this. You got yourself a great read if you buy this!