Ambient Parking Lot

A rollicking exposé of modern life, Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot is about the unspoken, with aims to represent the voice of an emerging counterculture. The book chronicles the artistic whims and serious-minded endeavors of a band of musicians who record the sounds of parking lots, as they wander the overdeveloped landscape of a city and its exurbs, collaborate with a dance troupe to protest a war, and stumble into the sought-after yet volatile public and academic arenas. Crafted with language that alternates between the poetic, witty, outrageous, and tender, Lu's work of fiction moves swiftly from the droll to the compelling, narrated by a "we" that relates not just the story of a band but of a country--its continuing dependency on the automobile and the consequences to the natural world: "We zoomed toward the outlands, where drooping electrical wires traced patterns of drift and escape. We hurtled into the hinterlands, where underground silos housed long-range ballistic missiles. Smog was a steady artifact, a low-lying smear across a canvas of middling air." Reminiscent of the ecological plot of a Hayao Miyazaki film, the band grapples with their contemporary environment and amplifies the parking lots' white noise for their audiences, while a consciousness grows in them of what they are really hearing and in the reader of where Lu is taking us. The band's transformation in the end takes place with the help of two momentous characters, a pirate radio station master and a performance artist (each narrated by an "I" in a separate chapter that interrupts the main storyline), who reveal their own paths to transformation.