Book Review: ‘The Farewell Tour,’ by Stephanie Clifford

THE FAREWELL TOUR, by Stephanie Clifford

“The Farewell Tour,” by Stephanie Clifford, is the story of Lillian Waters, a fictional country music singer in the vein of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. I loved Clifford’s debut novel, “Everybody Rise,” a vibrant explosion of a book set among graduates of elite prep schools in 2006 Manhattan, so I was eager to follow Clifford into the world of what one character calls “hillbilly music.”

As the novel opens, Lillian (also known by her stage name, “Water Lil”) is hitting the road one last time, planning a summer tour through “the county-fair circuit” and ending up in the town she fled as a child, Walla Walla, Wash. Unbeknown to her fans and band members, Lillian has a polyp on her vocal cord and plans to retire for good after Walla Walla; she’s not interested in treatments that could prolong her career. “As for surgery,” she says, “I knew one gal with the prettiest voice, sweet and clear as a flute, who went under the knife and sounded like Orson Welles afterward.”

Lillian is 56 years old in 1980 and washed up — her life full of struggles, mistakes and unrequited love, without much hope on the horizon. But as we follow Lillian’s farewell tour, we are also given alternating chapters that bring us back in time, starting in 1924. Water Lil’s rise to stardom is breathtaking; I enjoyed being immersed in a world of suede and fringed costumes, cowboy boots and giant wigs. I appreciated the look into the process of songwriting and one woman’s struggle to earn a place in the man’s world of Nashville in the late 1960s and ’70s, not to mention the even steeper hills faced by Lillian’s nonwhite friends and fellow musicians.

“The Farewell Tour” is a shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West, which feels real and vital thanks to Clifford’s gift for description. Of Bakersfield, Calif., in 1960, Lillian says, “In the day, the light was harsh and flat and brought out the scuffs and dust.” At night, though, “When the heat receded and the sky grew dim, Bakersfield came alive in neon and rhythm guitar.”

An account of Water Lil’s early shows reads like a found poem: “We played the Hidy-Hody Ranch Bar, and the Circle-M Saloon, the Round-Up Rodeo and the Boiler Room, the Gunshot Lounge and Gunshot Bar and Gunshot Club.” When she checks in with her manager Coy Roy via pay phone, he reminds her to sing about topics like “lost love,” which put her in a sympathetic light. “That meant: no songs about the road, about ambition, about men I tumbled into hotel beds with when I was drunk enough.”

Even as her tour stops leap off the page, Water Lil herself remains a cipher. Perhaps this is inevitable — she has spent her life dressing up in costumes and writing songs about a false persona, one created for commercial appeal and stripped of agency and messy desires. But something breaks loose when she visits Tule Lake, Calif., where the parents of Lillian’s Japanese American fiddle player, Kaori, were interned during World War II. When Kaori asks why Lillian didn’t do anything to protest the internment camps, she responds, “I didn’t know what to do.” And thinks: “I didn’t have a good answer for her. My generation didn’t protest like hers did, but I wasn’t sure if it was because we weren’t aware that we could, or because we were scared to risk what we had, or we — I — just didn’t care enough to get involved.”

In the final pages of the novel, Lillian dares to acknowledge that her beloved West is an imperfect place: “It has been flawed since Juan Pérez and Charles William Barkley thought it needed to be discovered. Since Vancouver and Gray sailed in, and Lewis and Clark came overland and started naming things in their own language, after their own people.” And so on, all the way to Kaori’s parents’ internment, to the stories of “all-Black regiments and redlined neighborhoods.”

With only two shows left, Water Lil begins to find her purpose: “I could brush the snow from the crevasses, and show how we, imperfect, broken, lost, gone, silenced, were always part of the story.” Water Lil may be saying farewell, but after she performs the song she has written about her own life, she has an epiphany: “And then I knew where I would go, what I would do. For in the end, I had sung my song.”

Amanda Eyre Ward is the best-selling author of “The Jetsetters” and “The Lifeguards.” Her new novel, “What We Did for Love,” will be published in 2024.

THE FAREWELL TOUR | By Stephanie Clifford | 352 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $29.99