A keen-eyed depiction of the rock netherworld’s denizens is sabotaged by too many over-the-top scenarios.
A practiced observer offers frantic fictions of rock ’n’ roll madness.
Simmons has been plying her trade as a music journalist since the ’70s, in Mojo, Rolling Stone, Q, and a host of British dailies and weeklies and has penned biographies of the off-center pop figures Serge Gainsbourg and Neil Young. Here, however, she turns her hand to that most difficult form: rock fiction. The format is a loosely interlocking collection of stories featuring a handful of recurring characters: megalomaniac metal star Frame, oft-married country luminary LeeAnn Starmountain, Jim Morrison tribute performer Reeve, addled punk-pop vocalist Pussy, and damaged classic-rock songwriter Cal West. Some of the characters are familiar types, others veiled simulacra of real performers (Pussy is Debbie Harry, Cal West is Brian Wilson, etc.). These figures and others are involved in 18 tales set in a musical cosmos that is, as one character puts it, “like one of those parallel universes they had in the old sci-fi comics, where things look the same but have completely different functions.” In this domain, a cult devoted to the late Karen Carpenter springs up, a televised séance to raise a dead music legend is held on an LA beach, and a rocker urinates on his fans off a hotel balcony. Inevitably, stalkers stalk, groupies grope, and superstars suffer colossal breakdowns. Simmons has all the details of record-company politicking, rock-biz noblesse oblige, and backstage ritual down pat. But her plots suffer from the same excess that plagues so many works set in the milieu. Since everything in rock is drawn in larger-than-life proportions, fiction writers feel they must push the envelope and stoke the outrageous at every turn. In the case of Simmons, when she goes in for affecting character studies, the pieces work brilliantly, but she pushes most of the action in preposterous directions, often to the point of burlesque.
A keen-eyed depiction of the rock netherworld’s denizens is sabotaged by too many over-the-top scenarios.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4156-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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