Virtual and reality

The implication is that they record a life story. In fact it is a virtual life story. He has written it all himself: reviews, news clips, feature articles, readers’ letters. Drinking and drugging heavily, he lives by tending bar with occasional cash from his hard-up sister Denise, a former groupie and still his only genuine human connection.

Denise’s own world wavers between the virtual and the real. In her 20s she went through a promiscuous phase; then, deciding that sex and friendship were incompatible, she took up with a series of gay men. When one proves a vigorous lover, instead of conceding that he is heterosexual she rationalizes that this has to be how a gay man has sex with a woman.

The result was her daughter, Ada, a would-be filmmaker and her most intimate companion. Denise’s care for her is genuine. So are her visits to her mother, who shows signs of incipient Alzheimer’s. When a minor memory glitch convinces Denise, at 47, that she will get it too, she dips into her mother’s medications, imagining flakily that this will work as prevention.

Denise tells most of the story, though much of what relates to Nik is contained in the 32 volumes of his “Chronicles.’’ This makes it murkily confusing for the reader, who can’t tell which parts of his life and musical career are true and which made up. After a while we may not care. Denise’s voice, on the other hand, brilliantly suggests a prisoner contending with her bars.

In “Stone Arabia’’ the bars are the lack of any: our easy access to unlimited information, unlimited music and entertainment, seeming friendships, and all manner of virtual experience free from the rigors of the real. Easy, yet yielding up autonomy to the algorithm.