Last Night at the Disco

Borders (The Fifty-First State) introduces readers to a deliciously unlikable antihero with an ax to grind in this hilarious novel. Lynda Boyle’s story unfolds in an email she sends to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in 2019, purportedly to demand corrections to a recent article in which she’s mentioned. Gradually, however, the message reveals why she disappeared from her rock ’n’ roll life decades earlier. The article is about her old friends, musicians Aura Lockhart and Johnny Engel. Now 67, Lynda met the pair in 1977 as a junior high English teacher in New Jersey, where she’d wound up after failing as a poet in the East Village. She takes Aura, her student, to an open mic night, where they’re both captivated by a performance from punk rocker Johnny. His band then rises to fame, thanks in part to Lynda landing them a gig at Studio 54, where she’s a regular. After Lynda flees following a drug bust, however, she never sees Aura and Johnny again. The author revels in the irony of Lynda, a manipulative narcissist who constantly reminds Jann of her beauty, often mistaking others’ snide reactions as appreciation (to her delight, her former teacher John Ashbery called one of her poems “painfully exact”). Readers will be hooked by this tragicomic romp. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Aevitas Creative Management. (Oct.)