Loud, wild, messy, and fun—just like the best rock ’n’ roll.
Now it can be told: Elvis Presley was . . . a closet rock critic.
Satirist Pollack, who punctured the pretensions of literary criticism in The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, savages rock and its sycophantic critics in his first novel. Fittingly, he is the main character in the book, which is couched—not always successfully, in terms of point of view—as a biography by the megalomaniac, lickspittle academic Paul St. Pierre. “Neal Pollack” is the first and greatest of rock critics, a superhuman consumer of booze and dope and a participant in every form of ambisexual perversity. (The larger-than-life character is clearly inspired by the late Lester Bangs, the manic, prolific subject of Jim DeRogatis’s biography Let It Blurt, while St. Pierre appears modeled after high-middle-brow author Greil Marcus.) The central conceit—that rock criticism is more important than the music itself—drives the action through the entire history of rock ’n’ roll. “Pollack” appears, Zelig-like, at every critical moment in rock to shape the music’s direction: he befriends Elvis Presley in Memphis, hits the road with neophyte folkie Bob Dylan (and beds Joan Baez), hangs out with the Velvet Underground, creates Iggy Pop’s over-the-top stage persona, roadies for Bruce Springsteen, forms the Ramones, has an affair with Patti Smith, and mentors Kurt Cobain. Along the way, his avatar, bluesman Willie “Clambone” Jefferson, invents Detroit funk and rap music. Numerous real-life critics, including Bangs, make cameo appearances. There’s even a mock discography. The loopy, sex- and drug-steeped, violent plot, though unsatisfactorily resolved, incorporates a number of dumb yet pointed parody lyrics that take the abundant wind out of rock’s soiled sails. The choicest moments come in fine-tuned mocking of rock criticism’s fatuous clichés, radically overblown praise, and flavor-of-the-month bandwagon jumping. The message: Get over it, guys, it’s only rock ’n’ roll.
Loud, wild, messy, and fun—just like the best rock ’n’ roll.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052790-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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