The song remains the same in most rock and roll novels. Often thinly veiled memoirs, they’re crammed with a few anecdotes of life on the road but little of the human mechanics that make good fiction.

Luckily, Tim Wynveen’s Sweeter Life comes with a better pedigree. Wynveen won the 1998 Commonwealth Writers Best First Book award for his novel Angel Falls. He also has the necessary musical background, though if he’s looking for hard rock credibility it might be best to cut from his bio notes any mention of touring with “Lady in Red” softie Chris de Burgh.

At the core of Sweeter Life are the intertwined stories of three siblings: Hank the embittered ex-convict; Isabel with her long nails and brittle personality, her pantsuits and increasingly successful real-estate deals; and the young guitarist Cyrus, who is by far Wynveen’s most compelling creation. One night while out walking the rural roads near his aunt and uncle’s farm, Cyrus is picked up by a shady rock promoter and persuaded to tour with a roadshow called the Jimmy Waters Revival. It’s the beginning of a life that will elevate him to various degrees of rock stardom.

Wynveen flips between Cyrus’s misadventures in the music industry and his family members’ attempts to find meaningful connections with each other. Stretches of the novel are dedicated to the allure of the guitar and detailed descriptions of Cyrus’s jam sessions. But for all his musical knowhow, Wynveen is more effective when sorting through the dangers and rewards of sibling relations.

Wynveen sets up his characters quickly in the book’s muted first quarter, but from then on he works hard at pushing each of them along their various emotional courses. When the changes come, the family’s small victories and failures are honest and earned. The characters actually deepen as events unfold – a rarity among the loud clichés of most rock novels. Sweeter Life may not be a fast-fingered guitar solo of a novel, but it’s as sturdy and rewarding as the prized Les Paul six-string that Cyrus strums throughout.