Everyone's Pretty
By Lydia Millet (Soft Skull, $13)
Lydia Millet is a capable writer, able to birth sentences with pleasant dips and bows, but these do little to assuage Everyone's Pretty, a slapdash farce with rancid characters and a forced plot. The setting for her fourth novel is Los Angeles, which isn't used any more intimately than a background set in an old Western movie. Lousy with polluted sunsets and broken souls, the City of Angels is again relegated to an uninspired reference point for all things depraved.
Joseph Foster
The Wisner brothers.
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Five main characters intersect, or come close, in a showdown of sorts based loosely around Dean Decetes, a silver-tongued pornographer with a steel gullet. Drinking whiskey and pronouncing himself "the Godhead" (much to the horror of his pious sister Bucella), Dean starts at the bottom, which makes the rest of his adventures, including those with his midget sidekick, Ken, a great heaping of moot points. Bucella, meanwhile, entertains fantasies about her boss and tries to save the wife of one of her co-workers, a woman who barely stirs our concerns as she appears in every scene either naked, wasted, or in half-witted conjugal commitment with Dean.
The only character who somewhat manages to communicate the book's themes of alienation without lapsing into complete repellency is Alice, another of Bucella's co-workers. Her troubled family life actually lends some credence, but it gets lost in the clutter of Pretty's rather frantic three-day plot. When other characters are beating parrots to a pulp or mummifying corpses, Alice's small but important insights are all too easily missed: "One day," she thinks, " . . . she would watch the fractured splinters of her will fuse again, a perfect sphere of resolve. It would illuminate her landscape like the noonday sun." Millet's characters live their lives in the dankest pools of human existence; by the time a few rays cast down on the lucky, no one is left to care. MARGARET WAPPLER
The Best in Rock Fiction
Edited by June Skinner Sawyers and Anthony DeCurtis (Hal Leonard, $16.95)
Was it Frank Zappa who said writing about music was like dancingabout architecture? Whoever it was, we've seen plenty of writers try to span the unbridgeable opposites, to unite the immediacy of hearing music with the critical distance of reading about it.
For every success (E.M. Forster's evocation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Howard's End, Jack Kerouac's hymns to jazz in On the Road), you can count dozens of great authors who couldn't get the mystery onto the page. That's one of the things to like about music, how well it eludes analysis.
That's criticism; then there's fiction— 21 stories and excerpts here that use rock music as an inspiration or subject. Lesser entries in this anthology make rock a background for the usual stories of family dysfunction and romantic bewilderment. But for every piece of drunken hopelessness with Bruce Springsteen on the radio, there is another that gets the music right somehow.
In "Burn Me Up," Tom Piazza absolutely nails the befuddled hostility of a rockabilly legend 30 years into his decline, unable to understand why fans keep coming back to his shows no matter how badly he acts. And an excerpt from Madison Smartt Bell's novel Anything Goes pulls off an even tougher trick, effectively putting the reader onstage, guitar in hand, mystery girl watching.
Roddy Doyle's The Commitments and P.F. Kluge's Eddie and the Cruisers were both made into films, and the excerpts here show why. Other writers in the volume include Nick Hornby, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Sherman Alexie, whose Reservation Blues passage is a sharp and very funny portrait of an Indian rock band, but says little about actual music.
The biggest disappointment has to be "Rock-and-Roll Fantasy" by Ray Davies, whose work with the Kinks made him one of the most revered songwriters of the British Invasion. How could the author of "Waterloo Sunset" and "Lola" have such a cloth ear for dialogue? PETER SPENCER
