This dreamlike album of real and imagined scenes from a complex artist’s memory bank is as flamboyant a display of light and...
The sometimes-murky details behind a rhythm-and-blues legend are transformed by dark magic and even darker comedy into an eccentric mélange of imaginative speculation and cultural criticism.
The artist known for much of his adult life as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1929-2000) is pre-eminent among one-hit wonders for his hyperbolic 1956 R&B classic, “I Put A Spell On You,” whose shrieking and yowling vocal effects were enhanced in live performances by gaudy horror-movie theatrics—e.g. a real coffin from which he would emerge. Because that sui generis blend of novelty tune and blues shout has been both the first and last thing most people think about when thinking about Hawkins, outsized legends about his life have superseded known facts. But that doesn’t bother Binelli, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone best known for his bluesy, impassioned 2012 travelogue of urban decline, Detroit City Is the Place to Be. Binelli uses the mythology Hawkins helped create about himself as a means of getting at the essence of his lasting appeal. He also debunks some myths; notably the oft-repeated—and, in Binelli’s words, “almost certainly untrue”—tale of how Hawkins’ greatest hit was the result of him and his session musicians getting “blind drunk” recording what was supposed to be a straight ballad. Binelli steeps other, more furtive elements of Hawkins’ life story in impressionistic scenes from Jalacy Hawkins’ Ohio upbringing, followed by even more impressionistic vignettes, including speculative reconstructions of dialogue Hawkins had with such myriad figures as guitarist Tiny Grimes; legendary, ill-fated rock DJ Alan Freed; the ghost of Jimmy Gilchrist, Fats Domino’s dead-from-overdose opening act; and Elvis Presley, who (so Hawkins says) pressed him for information about Haitian voodoo. There’s even a what-if reimagining of Presley’s 1957 movie, Jailhouse Rock, with Hawkins in the lead. None of which, in this novel’s loose and baggy form, would work without Binelli’s shrewd takes on pop culture, racial identity, and 20th-century American mores.
This dreamlike album of real and imagined scenes from a complex artist’s memory bank is as flamboyant a display of light and shadow as one of Hawkins’ stage shows.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-535-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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