Never Mind Nirvana — Mark Lindquist

"Hip deep in music, Never Mind Nirvana is a telling inside view that perfectly captures the rhythms and sights of late-nineties Seattle."
-- Peter Buck, guitarist of R.E.M.

Pete Tyler is at a crossroads. Eight years ago he dropped out of a seminal Seattle grunge band to try his hand at a more grown-up calling. Now he's thirty-six ("almost forty!"), a deputy prosecutor (a suit), still hanging out at the same clubs he played ten years ago (the ones that haven't shut down), and still dating the same kind of girls (except now they tell him how much their older sisters loved his band).

Pete decides it's time to get married -- he just doesn't know to whom. Possibilities include Beth, his first love, who has disappeared; Winter, his on-and-off stripper girl-friend, who has been living the grunge life too long; and Esme´, a Sub Pop A&R executive who has some life decisions of her own to make. When a date-rape case lands on his desk -- the accused is a local rocker Pete's age, the accuser an eighteen-year-old from the scene -- Pete finds his past and present facing him from both sides of the aisle, and he finally has to decide where he stands.

Pete Tyler is a cooler version of Everyguy, and Never Mind Nirvana is a hilarious and unexpectedly moving story of a man with one foot stuck in adolescence and the other planted in adulthood. Richly textured with references to classic rock and the music of Seattle's legendary alternative rock scene, it is also a fascinating, bittersweet riff on a particularly American zeitgeist.