Can Any Literati Truly Rock Out?
When David Kamp opened up his review of Jonathan Lethem‘s new novel with the declaration that writing a rock novel entails “the hopeless task of getting the tone right, of reconciling the wild, stupid excitement of rock with the rigorous, contemplative act of literature-making,” and that even Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo “haven’t quite pulled it off,” I’ll admit: As much as I agreed with him about those two books, I wanted to know if he thought there were any authors who’d managed to make the “tough genre” work.
“Personally, I’ve yet to discover a front-to-back, fully satisfying rock novel,” Kamp wrote in response to an email query. “The nonfiction remains the most satisfying: Ian Hunter’s Diary of a Rock and Roll Star, Iggy Pop’s I Want More, Barney Hosykns’s Waiting for the Sun and so on.” This was a bit surprising—although I was a callow youth when I read The Commitments, so my memories may be a bit idealized—but I couldn’t argue with him about the great nonfiction (to which one could also add John Lydon‘s memoir, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs), so I passed on a few recommendations, like the unfortunately semi-obscure Say Goodbye by Lewis Shiner, and left it at that. But what about you: Do you have a Great Rock Novel in mind?
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