Anyone heard of/read this novel?

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Sorry in advance for the looooooooong post, but ...

No Matter How Much You Promise To Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew it Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again.

A Symphonic Novel

Edgardo Vega Yunqué

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

656 pages

Size: 6 x 9

$25.00

Hardcover

Pub Date: 10/2003

ISBN: 0-374-22311-4

An epic novel of jazz, race and the effects of war on an American family

This sweeping drama of intimately connected families --black, white, and Latino-- boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidamía Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from her affluent home to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father Billy Farrell now lives with his second family. Once a gifted jazz pianist, Billy lost two fingers in the Vietnam War and has since shut himself off from jazz.

In this powerful modern odyssey, Vidamía struggles to bring her father back to the world of jazz. Her quest gives her a new understanding of family, particularly through her half-sisters Fawn, a lonely young poet plagued with a secret, and Cookie, a sassy, streetsmart homegirl who happens to be "white." And when Vidamía becomes involved with a young African-American jazz saxophonist, she is forced to explore her own complex roots, along with the dizzying contradictions of race etched in the American psyche.

Edgardo Vega Yunqué vividly captures the myriad voices of our American idiom like a virtuoso spinning out a series of expanding riffs, by turns lyrical, deadly, flippant, witty, and haunting.

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I read another review of this somewhere else that indicates the author actually weaves real jazz players into the novel, too ... For example, the character Billy Farrell was supposed to have played with Miles Davis before going to war ... and a number of other musicians are characters, too.

This reviews makes the book sound a little lame, but other reviews I've seen (but can't find right now) play this up as a pretty gritty book that has a significant focus on New York jazz in the '60s. Here's some more stuff about the book/author:

With a story that mixes Puerto Rican and Irish, jazz and the symphony, Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s new novel is as American as the city itself.

"I edit in the morning, and then at night I write hot,” says Edgardo Vega Yunqué, who claims he works on six or seven novels at once (“You don’t get your relatives mixed up, do you?”) but until now has published only two, along with a story collection. For the 67-year-old Brooklynite (via East Harlem, the South Bronx, and Puerto Rico), the latest—which Farrar, Straus & Giroux publishes this fall—is the big one, both literally and figuratively. Right down to the title. No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again has a kitchen-sink quality—which isn’t to its detriment—even after being edited down from 1,200 pages to a meager 658.

“I didn’t want to feel restricted by a straight line of narrative,” says Vega. “I wanted to go into the digressive mode of novel-writing. I used the idea of a symphony, but also of the mural. You see a lot of different faces; you jump around from one to the other and see the relationship between them.”

The fleet-footed looseness of jazz improv and Nuyorican slam poetry pervades Vega’s style. The plot, meanwhile, is both simple (half-Irish, half–Puerto Rican Vidamía Farrell finds her long-lost father) and sprawling (wars are fought, musical movements die, racial conflicts erupt). “My life hasn’t been all that exciting, and maybe that’s why I write fiction,” says the writer, but he’s being a bit coy. “By the time I was 10 years old, before I left Puerto Rico, I had seen three people killed in front of me,” says Vega, who caught another eyeful after coming to New York at age 13 without a word of English. “Death has been a big part of my life.”

He found respite on the Upper West Side during the sixties and seventies, throwing parties, helping draft dodgers, and raising a family that includes stepdaughter Suzanne Vega. Perhaps there’s a parallel with Barry, Vidamía’s benevolent stepfather in his novel—though, says Vega, “Suzanne is a wonder child. Vidamía was just a bright kid.” In the nineties, he ran the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, a vast Lower East Side visual- and performing-arts space. All of which makes him one of the city’s great supporting characters. Is he ready for more?

“I don’t want much,” says Vega. “I live very frugally. I’m basically a schmuck. I don’t want to be a star; I just want the book to do well.” —Boris Kachka