Up To a Point

Geronimo Horowitz has been around the music business long enough to know where the bodies are buried. More dangerously, he no longer particularly minds telling you.

Up To a Point is the darkly comic, fiercely candid story of a songwriter, pianist, husband, father, lover, and occasional reliable witness to his own life.

Beginning in Reagan-era California and moving through San Francisco, New York in the shadow of 9/11, and eventually to the Hudson Valley, Geronimo recounts a life spent close enough to fame to know what it looks like from the other side of the velvet rope. Along the way there are record deals that almost happen, careers that happen to other people, marriages and affairs, children, betrayals, friendships, disastrous decisions, beautiful songs, and the persistent suspicion that success may have less to do with talent than anyone in the music business would care to admit.

Geronimo is an artist who has spent a lifetime resisting the life other people expected him to live. But as the years accumulate-and the distance between the man he imagined becoming and the man he has actually become grows harder to ignore-his greatest subject turns out not to be music at all. It is love: romantic love, failed love, the complicated love between parents and children, and finally the possibility of beginning again when beginning again seems faintly ridiculous.

Funny, unsentimental, intimate, and increasingly difficult to separate from autobiography, Up To a Point is a novel about ambition and disappointment, fidelity and betrayal, fatherhood and aging, and the peculiar persistence required to continue making art when the world has declined to make you famous for it.

It is also the story of a man who has spent decades explaining himself-and has finally reached the point where he may no longer believe his own explanation.

Up To a Point is Geronimo Horowitz's first novel.