Ambient Parking Lot

A rollicking exposé of modern life, Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot is about the unspoken, with aims to represent the voice of an emerging counterculture. The book chronicles the artistic whims and serious-minded endeavors of a band of musicians who record the sounds of parking lots, as they wander the overdeveloped landscape of a city and its suburbs, collaborate with a dance troupe to protest a war that evokes 9/11, and stumble into the sought-after yet volatile public and academic arenas. Crafted with language that alternates between the poetic, witty, outrageous, and tender, Lu's work of fiction moves swiftly from the droll to the compelling, narrated by a "we" that relates the story of not only a band but a country--its continued dependency on the automobile and the consequences to the natural world: "Then the economy collapsed and our theory was discarded in favor of an aesthetic of banal scarcity. Secular pragmatism replaced the faith-based work ethic which had once led to the lush arpeggios of grocery bags being loaded into single-driver vehicles and trunk lids thumping to a close in the late afternoon sunlight." The band grapples with their contemporary environment and amplifies the parking lot noise for their audiences, while a consciousness grows in them of what they are really hearing and in the reader of where Lu is taking us. The band's critical shift in the end takes place with the help of two momentous characters, a pirate radio station master and performance artist (each narrated by an"I" in a separate chapter that interrupts the main storyline), who reveal their own paths to transformation.