The dissatisfied hick is one of Laurie Graham's specialities. Admirers of her work will recall the Liberace doppelgänger Sel Boff in Mr Starlight, who arrived, all a-glitter, in Vegas via Saltley, near Birmingham; and the lightly fictionalised version of Wally Warfield in Gone with the Windsors, brought up in a Baltimore boarding house and fetching up as a ducal consort.
The latest addition to these makeover artists is Buzz (christened Beryl Eunice Ermengild) Wexler, formerly of Troy Hill, Pittsburgh, although not for long. The neglected child of middle-aged parents, Buzz checked out the location of the Greyhound bus station when she was 12 and, four years later, bought a one-way ticket to New York, followed by a move to London. Since then, she's become a music-industry legend: "By the time I was 30, I'd shaped the whole grunge aesthetic pretty much single-handed." But now she's 42 and, in spite of massive surgical enhancements, fools nobody into thinking she's any younger. Maybe the com-bination of drugs, booze and all-night clubbing cancels out the effects of cosmetic procedures.
Buzz is about to receive the Urban Music Panel's lifetime achievement award, a reminder that she's getting on a bit - as is her forcibly being shifted away from the management of groups such as Knifey-Spooney and Strep Throat into the gentler realms of world music, where her first gig is to take on tour a Bulgarian close-harmony singing group, the Gorni Grannies. Buzz is used to clients who trash hotel rooms - she's been known to throw a telephone or two herself - but not ones who manufacture cheese in them, have telephone conversations with their pet sheep back in Gorni and, in the case of one Granny, steal anything that moves. Adding to the excitement, another of the Grannies comes complete with her own minders: her grandson, Boyko, who's a Mr Big in the Bulgarian mafia, and two of his gruesome goons.
In spite of herself, Buzz loves the Grannies' singing - "It's the second time I've heard Go Down and both times something weird has happened, like I was this close to tears." Lubka, the group's leader, is equally attitude-altering. Her unflinching morality sustained her during the dark years of her country's communist regime, as it does in its new post-capitalist era, where hoods such as Boyko rule. She teaches Buzz notions of respect and honesty that are not often found in a recording studio.
Graham wraps serious questions in glorious comedy. A running gag is the mauling of the English language by the Grannies' stern interpreter, Olga, who mightily disapproves of Buzz - "How can you be high-echelon business executive? You dress like fruit pastry." But Buzz is about to discard her Rubber Queen frocks. The woman who changed the face of music finds that music of an unexpected kind is changing her. This scratchy, snappy heroine, a wonderful mixture of sass and solemnity, is a diverting addition to Graham's collection of highly original adventuresses.
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Life according to Lubka by Laurie Graham
Quercus £11.99 pp320