Sway: A Novel by Zachary Lazar Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Sway: A Novel
Book Review: "The devil in the top hat"
Summary: 4 Stars
"They're trying to be serious and sarcastic at the same time, emotional but also cool. All the helpful distinctions are being made pointless by their grating, persistent music." (31-32) Lazar here sums up one of the first concerts by the Stones, but this perception of their aesthetic carries into the whole narrative.
The review by BookReporter posted earlier gives the gist of the plot, so I will instead provide what earlier comments have not, a sense of the book's flavor. Lazar writes cleanly and sparely. You get little sense of the physical realm in which his characters roam. Brian reflects on their mid-decade endless tour which "had turned out to be a kind of endless tantalization, a way of traveling the world without ever really seeing it. What they had seen was duty-free shops, swimming pools, parking lots, ashtrays." (97) But, you enter their minds.
Watching Anger's "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome" film, Keith & Mick hear: "'Mortify the spirit in order to more purely inhabit the body,' a voice said in the darkness. 'Enter the nightmare until it loses the veneer of credibility.'" (133) The characters, whether a chillingly realized Manson and his sway over Beausoleil as the first chapter opens (and the only one with Charlie M. in it directly; the novel includes the murders through secondary means, which was a relief considering how intense many of the scenes had been with Anger and the Stones, even these dancers on the edge of a volcano luckily far from that man's evil); a floundering Brian, a shy Keith, and a calculating Mick; lonely Kenneth and a cocky Bobby: they all try to be, "an exception" as everyone below thirty by the end of the decade appears to be to whatever the rule had been.
The omniscient voice indirectly enters into the mentality of protagonists. Manson seems to Bobby to play a role that he makes fun of even as he dares his follower to believe him believing his own acting. No less than Mick, the everyday kids also enter into this attitude of life as trying on one costume after another, to break the mold, to shatter the complacency that rattles them and pursues them. This edginess pervades the whole novel. As filtered through the somewhat older observer-participant, 1969 Kenneth: "They were calling themselves the Love Generation now: these kids who didn't doubt themselves even when they were wrong, who would try anything, who acted as if life was an idea and not a block of time with a beginning and an end." (170)
That passage captures the tone of much of the narrative. This book will not prove soothing. It's sharp, prickly, and feverish. While I wished fewer dreams pervaded the storyline, I suppose it's almost archetypal in its deserts of California and Morocco, and their clash with suburban Cheltenham and Chelsea. It's not hectoring, but it can be relentless, for it repeats the downfall of hope, and the ascension of despair. It's judgmental, as Mick provides along with echoes by the weaker Anger a dissection of the era's utopian yearning. Those who triumph manage to subsume hippie innocence into a dystopian confrontation with reality, the harder-edged zeitgeist that will enable the stronger to survive what overwhelms Bobby and Brian, and which threatens to drown Kenneth and Anita. We know what happened to Manson, Jagger, and Richards.
It's also a sign of Lazar's confidence that he can mix such iconic figures into an imaginative evocation of an era that's so filtered through albums, art, fashion, drugs, excoriation, and nostalgia. Anger films the Hyde Park concert and thinks about "the new death cult in the Aquarian style" how "it was the logic of thanatomania, not a sequence of cause and effect but an underlying current, a unifying style. With each death, the mystery of death took on more and more glamour, the romance making the human world feel less and less bound to the earth." (187) Again, you feel the spare quality of Lazar's voice.
As I mentioned, not an easy novel to like, but one to admire. He's done his research, tinted it with his own imagined journalism deftly, and colored the whole psychedelic trip in colors that convince you. It's most memorable in its afterglow-- one that haunts more than comforts. Not a long book, but the arrangement of chapters, the selection of events, and the detail of the inner demons may blunt the impact for some. This may be verisimilitude, for Lazar's taken on the difficult task of recreating the come-downs after the highs. Necessarily disorienting and dispairing, therefore; the studied langours of the middle of the narrative may have lingered too long in our passages into Brian's addled mind, or in the placement of a rather awkward coda of Anita and Kenneth in 2002.
Yet, Lazar takes on Altamont and conveys it to you vividly, he interprets the Manson Family's fall intelligently, and he gives you a sympathetic without sycophantic portrayal of the Anita-Keith-Mick-Brian tangle, the spell that captures Bobby, and the magick that lures Kenneth all into the evil eye that's got them in its sway.
Lazar at his best can distill the essence of many of his already well-biographed characters with elegance and compassion. For instance, a 1962 Keith "knows every lick from every Chuck Berry record ever made, an indication of how much time he's spent alone." (24) The omniscient narrator on Mick as fame takes hold: "It's a face he's had all his life, one that has molded his personality, and now it's a face that carries him as the personality begins to fade." (48)
Or, Kenneth's view of Mick as he will appear on the American tour: "He could see Mick onstage in either [of two props, two top-hats, one black, one an Uncle Sam starred-and-striped hat} of them, moving toward the microphone, raising his fist. The devil in the top hat-- they were associated somehow. The god of power-- money, politics, war. The sly, sophisticated con man who in the end was just a bewildering reflection of all the people who were looking at him." (207)
Book Review: A lot of big things happened in the '60s
Summary: 4 Stars
Sway is a fictionalized history of different individuals in the 1960s. Some you'll likely recognize: Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Charles Manson. Some are more memorable for their deeds, like Bobby Beausoliel, a little known actor and musician until he committed the first Manson murder. Then there's the man who ties them all together. Kenneth Anger, creator of odd, dark, "art" films, one of which just happens to contain all of the previously mentioned people.
While Anger's film is the tie that binds them all together, there is no discernible time line throughout this book. It's a jumble of histories and influences, beginnings and endings, quiet dramatic moments and big memorable moments. One thought or moment leads you into the next, not necessarily chronologically.
This is a re-imagining of what made these people who they were. How Mick and Keith acquired their unique style, and what drove Brian to the edge he would never come back from. What drew Anger to the occult to begin with? What could lead an average boy like Bobby to murder? It's a simpler look at the lives the real people might have had, before we turned them into gods.
Lazar has done a great job of blurring the line. Between actual fact, and the honesty the book seems to exude, it's hard to tell what's real and what's fiction. You get the feeling that he was the proverbial fly on the wall, only recently able to share his knowledge.
Not having lived through the time frame, but being fascinated by it, I have to say this is a really good piece of work. You truly feel transported to that time and place, and that you've gotten to know these untouchable people. Which somehow makes them more iconic.
My main thought at the end of this book was: That was really good, but what just happened? Which is how I imagine a lot of people felt at the end of that time in history.
Armchair Interviews says: That was quite a time of amazing change, both good and bad.
Book Review: Can't You Hear ME Knockin'?
Summary: 3 Stars
Is it really fiction? Yes and no, and that's what makes it appealing. There is so much "fact" in this novel that the reader feels like a voyeur in the seamier side of the 60s. I admit to being more facinated with the Stones story than the Manson or Anger. As an avid fan for most of my life, I found the Brian, Keith, Mick and Anita Pallenberg characters so believable that those chapters read like lost pieces from the various biographies over the years. Lazar isn't big on the motivations of his characters, but rather lets little vignettes play out, leaving us to make our own decisions about why the events happened. Interestingly enough, Mick and Keith come off as far less sinister and complicit in Brian's death than in many of the biographies. There is a strong homosexual udercurrent throughout the novel (and not seemingly for its own sake) that adds to this decadent portrayal of why and how the 60s ended. Fans of the Stones and those interested in the other side of the "peace and love" 60s should read this book. The glimpses into the early Stones was worth the price of admission for me.Book Review: Lazar uses recognized names of real people, and reference to authentic or reported incidents taken from the era
Summary: 5 Stars
Sway: is a descriptive work focused upon what became recognized as the counter culture of sex, music, drugs, together with atypical behaviors that was prevalent in the United States during the late 1960s. Author Lazar interweaves a made-up, three branched storyline interlacing independent, separate, episodes relating to the life of ultramodern avant-garde film-maker filmmaker Kenneth Anger; the early days of the Rolling Stones and actions of The Charles Manson family.
Lazar uses recognized names of real people, and reference to authentic or reported incidents taken from the era. These incidents involving The Stones, Manson Family and Anger are interwoven to create his novel.
Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson Family is used as criterion figure to bring together these three, unrelated, groups.
The account begins in 1969 with Bobby and Charlie going from the ranch into town where they enter a dwelling. And in 1962, on Edith Grove, a dilapidated street in London is the date in the following chapter beginning with The Stones, Brian, Mick, and Keith playing music.
Chapter to chapter the novelist moves the reader in a dance from one fictionalized incident to the next fictionalized event, with all focusing around characters bearing the names of well known personages during the 1960s.
From the outset the Author assures the reader, 'this is a work of fiction.' He goes on to assert that the book is an appraisal of how a hodgepodge of public lives were detached from the sphere of fact and have become a kind of contemporary folk lore.
While the players listed on the pages of the book may bear the given names of the actual people they name, their comings and goings, actions and interactions if any, have been imagined by the author and should be considered as products of that imagination.
The sway, or influence, the book is trying to elucidate is exposed as the control that results from having a camera trained on an actor and how that action causes the actor to consider himself significant and to be a star at least in his/her own mind, whether anyone ever sees the film or not is unimportant. The significance comes from simply being filmed.
Again, the sway, or influence, is also seen in the affect that Charles Manson had on the easily influenced young men and women who trailed along with him. That power continued even if it meant murder and mayhem. And finally writer Lazar presents the rock star way of life, which included the music and drugs, and the difficulty of rightness or wrongness that a person can have over the behavior of others during specific times or places which are filled with intense social renovation.
Writer Lazar set out to fictionalize and somehow interweave the dissimilar incidents which were 1. the short-term, turbulent climb and the return to relative inconsequentiality of intense filmmaker, Kenneth Anger; 2. the cyclonic rise to the top of the recording world by the Rolling Stones; and, 3. the misfortune centered around the Tate-LaBianca Murders.
A problem in writing a book in such fashion may lead to confusion for readers. Each of the individual circumstances, after being knit together in such fashion, may be viewed, by those who are unfamiliar, with the disparate stories and the non-connectedness of the incidents and may be left with a misguided understanding that somehow the three did have something to do one with the other.
The as presented on the pages of Sway; the 1960s was a period of adulation, cheeky disregard for convention, drug induced fog, insubordinate behaviors, psychedelic incidents, actions of missing rationality, at times violent, seething, disinclined and even self-righteous sneering. Sway is meant to lay bare everything the decade represented.
Sway, per author intent, portrays the spirit of the 60s as well as the, at times, unwarranted and inexplicable violence that was part of the times. While writing itself is good, flows smoothly from one storyline to the other, and holds reader interest; I was left pondering why Lazar wanted to knit together these particular three stories in his attempt to explain any of his premise. And, I pondered why he wanted to fictionalize them to begin with.
The intent of Sway, as I view it, is to exemplify how incidents, people themselves and their actions, or power as a factor may influence others. That seems pretty straight forward. It is by intermingling the separate elements that were separate and had no interaction with one another at all that more than a little confusion is produced. If these particular incidents were wanted to show that they did influence behaviors at that time it would have been a simple matter to simply set them down in separate chapters.
Underground filmmaker Anger is not a particularly awe-inspiring or even well known story from the 60s, however, having lived in California during the 60s I remember well the incidents of the Manson Family, the panic and repulsion shared by many, as the truth of the Tate-LaBianca murders became public and that is far more gripping than is a fictionalized anecdote produced by using the same names for the players and recounting the actual incidents as somehow linked.
I don't know anyone who lived during the 60s, especially those of my generation, who did not know something of the Stones, you didn't have to like them, but it was hard to not know something of them.
I remain puzzled, as to why the book written as it was. Sway: A Novel is not a bad book, and it is not a poorly written one. But, I must have missed something of the author's intent for intermingling these unrelated people and incidents.
Recommended for those who like fiction.
Befuddling Read ........ Recommended for those who like the genre 3 stars.
Molly Martin
Reviewer
Book Review: Like nothing you've ever read before
Summary: 5 Stars
"Sway" is amazing. It is an assault on the senses, with swirling visuals and throbbing music. The writing is full of beautiful, unusual, shocking descriptions. Through Lazar's artistry, public figures become fictional characters. Even with all we know about Mick, Keith, Brian (Jones), Kenneth Anger and Charlie (Manson), the book convincingly creates new personas for them. The dread of the scenes with Manson, the aching search of Anger's narrative, and the violence and tumult of the Rolling Stones are all new discoveries for the reader. This book literally rocks.