American Band by Kristen Laine

Kristen Laine’s American Band is Friday Night Lights for the geek set, the story of a championship high school marching band from Elkhart, Indiana, as it seeks to win another state title. Along the way it touches on themes playing out across the Midwest, from an influx of Hispanic immigrants to the departure of jobs to foreign lands.

Elkhart is a particularly appropriate setting. Once the capital of the American band-instrument industry, the northern Indiana city has seen those jobs trickle away. Recreational-vehicle factories have taken up some of the slack, but the clear sense is that Elkhart’s glory days are past. Still, the Concord Community High School Marching Minutemen are a force, a source of pride for the community and a driving influence in the lives of many of the students Laine profiles.

There is a driving narrative to the story — the band’s struggle to prepare for the state finals in Indianapolis, even as its legendary director is planning to leave the school at year’s end — but the richest parts of the book have to do with the individual students.

There is Grant, lead trumpet player and almost-certain class valedictorian, a charismatic leader who nonetheless struggles to resolve his Christian beliefs with his growing attraction to a female classmate, his first girlfriend.

There is Nick, an ace drummer who aspires to West Point.

And Amanda, the star flute player who wears a Star of David as a symbol “of her devotion to bringing about a Christian heaven on earth” in which Jesus would reign from a rebuilt Temple in Israel.

And there is Adilene, freshman clarinet player and new arrival in town who can’t play clarinet very well nor march in time with the other students, but who desperately wants to fit in; and Diana, the senior who takes Adilene under her wing. Unlike most of the other students, Adilene and Diana are Hispanic, part of the new population of the Corn Belt, and their shared struggles and ultimate successes are among the book’s more uplifting subplots.

It’s hard for an outsider to understand why band is so important to the community and the high school, and Laine does her best to explain. It’s interesting enough to learn that longtime director Max Jones has an office that’s nicer than most high school football coaches’, and he has a staff of assistant directors; for people who attended high schools where the band was run by a single harried teacher who also herded junior high school students, it’s a revelation.

It’s also surprising to learn the extent of the preparations for a performance that runs only a few minutes but is more intricately choreographed than any high school musical play. Overbearing parents, slacker students, intense rivalries with other high schools — American Band has many of the elements common to books about high school football.

But ultimately, there’s the rub. For an outsider, it’s easier to understand the tensions inherent in an athletic competition, far more familiar than the challenges of making students march in fast, perfect cadence while playing concert-level music. Laine has a good eye for detail and a knack for description — she explains that it’s risky to march in slow time because mistakes become more apparent and judges can pounce “as easily as owls spotting slow-moving mice.”

Yet the scenes Laine tries to pump full of tension feel flat. Maybe she tried too hard. The book suffers from a surfeit of characters, with the result that a reader doesn’t identify all that well with most of them. Jones, the band director nonpareil, seems to have a knack for motivating students and a system that forces teenagers to become leaders, but if he is able to describe that knack or how it was developed, the reader doesn’t know it.

Too many of the other characters seem one-dimensional: They’re potentially interesting, but we don’t learn enough about them. Teachers and students are introduced early in the book but then fade away. We need fewer details about most of the students and teachers and a lot more about just a couple of them.

The story of Grant underscores this. He’s one of the more interesting high schoolers in recent non-fiction: a brilliant student, a fine trumpet player whose success is due more to hard work than talent, a gentle upperclassman who leads by example and a devout Christian. He’s almost a cliche, too good to be true.

Yet he is far more complex than that, and Laine skillfully reveals more and more layers of his personality — the boy who won’t miss church and can’t figure out whether Jesus wants him to have a girlfriend, and the self-doubting teenager who seems to have everything going for him but struggles with depression. Because Laine spends so much time with Grant — and he is such a rich subject — the reader comes to know him, while other seemingly major players in the book fade.

At the end of the book Grant confronts two tragedies that make the everyday drama of high school classes and band competitions seem trivial, and Laine has portrayed him so well and so sympathetically that a reader can’t help but weep for him.

He’s the sort of wonderful kid you wish you knew, so you could hug him and say, “Hey — it’s going to be OK, and you will be too.”