rock novels | Thornfield Hall

Who wrote the great rock novel? I posted this list at my old blog in 2013 and do not yet have the answer. Any recommendations will be appreciated.

Marcelle Clements’ Rock Me (1989). I LOVE Marcelle Clements’ writing: she is a journalist as well as a novelist. Her first novel, Rock Me, is about a woman rock star, and very few rock novels are about women. The heroine, Casey, needs some time to herself. She goes to Hawaii and… Grade: A

Don Delillo’s Great Jones Street (1973). Rock star Bucky Wunderlick needs a retreat, but when Happy Valley Farms Commune finds him and drugs him, everything goes downhill. Grade: A

Clyde Edgerton’s The Night Train (2011). A beautifully-written, humorous novel about two boys, one black, one white, who perform rock and roll in a small Southern town in 1962. Jazz piano may be African-American Larry Lime’s ticket out of town, as he studies with a brilliant hemophiliac musician knows as the Bleeder; meanwhile, the privileged Dwayne, son of the owner of the furniture refinishing shop , learns the power of rock and roll through talented Larry Lime’s patient explication of James Brown’s “The Night Train.” Grade: A

Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987). An Irish band wants to bring soul to Dublin. Grade: A

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked (2009). The heroine, Annie, breaks up with her boyfriend, a middle-aged man obsessed with Tucker Crowe, a rock star who retired in 1984. After th dieysagree about Tucker Crowe’s new album, “Juliet, Naked,” Annie posts a bad review on the website that sparks a friendship between Annie and Tucker. Grade: A-

Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia (2011). The protagonist analyzes her relationship with her brother, a rock musician who has recorded his own original music at home, and distributed the limited editions of his records to his family. Grade: A-

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Beautifully written, interwoven stories about characters in the music business. The novel falls off a bit in the last few chapters, one done as a Power Point presentation, the other about a dystopian concert. Grade: A-

Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007). A very light novel about a Los Angeles alternative rock band, and, yes, there are women in the band. Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City are masterpieces, but I have to say this very short book is not his best. Lethem does long better. Grade: A-

Sylvie Simmons’s Too Weird for Ziggy. A collection of linked short stories about rock musicians. In one of the stories, a male rock star grows breasts and likes them. Simmons is a British rock journalist. Yes, it is a weird book. Grade: A-

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You may want to know: What is my cat’s favorite rock video? The answer is…

The best literary criticism is not at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The TLS, or The New York Review of Books. Such papers publish brilliant articles, but their editors are at a crossroads, experimenting with shorter articles, colloquial language, and reviews of romance novels to attract readers.

Perhaps the online science fiction/fantasy magazine Tor.com features the sharpest writing on the web these days, even if you do not read SF. (I rarely do.) Tor has recruited smart reviewers and lively columnists, among them SF writer Jo Walton, whose brilliant essays in What Makes This Book So Great were first published here; Maria Tatar, an expert on fairy tales who teaches at Harvard; Liz Bourke, who has a Ph.D. in classics and writes the “Sleeps with Monsters” column; and the SF novelist Judith Tarr, who writes about horses in science fiction.

I am a science fiction fan, though I don’t read much of it. When Tor (also an SF publisher) announced its acquisition of Scotto Moore’s novella, Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You, I noted it because I love rock novels. Recently published and on sale as a $3.99 ebook, this novella proved a wild ride.

The narrator, a music blogger, becomes obsessed with a new band, Beautiful Remorse, whose music he discovers through a Google alert to another obscure band. He spends all Saturday night listening to their first song over and over. And his physical reaction when he comes to himself Sunday morning is extreme exhaustion.

Then he decides to blog about Beautiful Remorse.

I was beginning to want more information about “Overture.” That’s my thing—I’ve been a music blogger since the earliest days of music blogging, and I’m never satisfied until I’ve digested not just the music itself, but all available metadata about the music. I need to place it in the firmament, understand where it came from, how it connects to the vast musical genre tree that defines consciousness as we know it. And this was no ordinary track, obviously, no simple confection—it swallowed you up like a drop of rain landing in the ocean and losing its coherence, its own identity.

Beautiful Remorse releases one hypnotic track a day, and soon the other bloggers are obsessed. The narrator feels that Airee Macpherson, the singer, is speaking to him personally. When he messages her at Tumblr to ask for an interview, she invites him to a concert in Austin. Let me just say that the band’s effect on the concert-goers is unexpected. It is a VERY good idea to wear industrial-strength earplugs.

This dark, rollicking novel is extremely plot-oriented. The writing is a bit pedestrian, but Moore is fascinating as he raises horrific questions about good and evil. I’m not quite sure what he means at the twisted end, but I enjoyed this little book thoroughly. And I’ll never feel the same about rock music.

ANOTHER ROCK NOVEL ON THE TBR

Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall. The book description says: “When the young members of a British acid-folk band are compelled by their manager to record their unique music, they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with dark secrets. There they create the album that will make their reputation, but at a terrifying cost: Julian Blake, the group’s lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen or heard from again….”