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ZACHARY LAZAR (NANCY CRAMPTON) |
Sway: A Novel
By Zachary Lazar
Little, Brown, 255 pp., $23.99
"Re-creates the 1960s," the jacket copy of Zachary Lazar's new novel, "Sway," says, which would seem at first to be an exercise in redundancy. It is a decade America has never really left behind. The Rolling Stones, who grace "Sway" 's jacket in all their youthful glory, usher in the new year as the world's top-grossing concert act - even as the amazingly lifelike corpse of Keith Richards nears the end of his own 60s.
Lazar's mode of engaging the volatile decade, though, is marvelously unexpected. He does not attempt to encompass or define or eulogize. He is rigorous in avoiding the kind of winking, hindsight-freighted knowingness of which a lesser writer might avail himself. Instead, Lazar finds his way inside the lives of the Stones, the Charles Manson "family," and the experimental gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger, demythologizing his characters by imbuing each one with a nuanced, deeply troubled inner life. The story of the '60s becomes - in the hands of a writer too young to have lived through that era - an intimate and finely wrought examination of a time when excitement about new ways of living often became frenzied devotion to the avatars of that newness, whether cult leaders or rock stars.
"Sway" is a meditation on personal magnetism, on the drift and desperation of icons and those who move within their circles. It is less a novel than a series of vignettes, and as such it passes the crucial test of the multi-thread narrative: Each section is absorbing enough that the reader is disappointed to be yanked out of it, only to be quickly absorbed by the next. Lazar's prose carries the day. His sentences are crafted with a subtle precision, and the emotional palette of his writing is wide and vibrant.
It is this dexterity that prevents "Sway" from seeming arbitrary as Lazar toggles between characters and leaps back and forth in time. Linking all three stories is Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician of stunning good looks who stars in an Anger film and becomes entangled in the Manson cult. He is a magnet of minor magnitude: An inspiration to Anger (himself more icon-maker than icon, forever in pursuit of actors capable of playing the angels and demons who populate his films), Bobby lacks the gravity to establish a circle of his own, and is instead drawn into Manson's.
The Manson thread receives the least attention of the three, and that is for the best. We see Manson only in glimpses, and from a considerable narrative distance, and thus he never comes into focus. Unlike Anger and the Stones, his past goes unexplored - and the earliest chapters in the lives of the filmmaker and the rock band are some of "Sway" 's most poignant.
We first meet Richards, Mick Jagger, and Brian Jones in 1962, as they struggle to find their sound in a frigid London flat electric with ambition, competition, and a sexual tension that predates the eventual love triangle among Jones, Richards, and Anita Pallenberg. Lazar is especially adept at chronicling the incremental evolution of their sound and image: the way three androgynous, painfully awkward British kids playing affected American blues begin to embody the sexuality and dark new spirit of the times, the same spirit Anger seeks to capture in films like "Lucifer Rising" and "Invocation of My Demon Brother." By the time myriad tragedies strike the band - drug busts, Pallenberg's abandonment of Jones for Richards, Jones's slow collapse and eventual death by drowning - our investment in these fragile, intensely human figures is profound.
Anger's life is relayed in even greater depth. Lazar rewinds to 1928 and follows the future filmmaker from early childhood, when a friend of his grandmother's lands him a small role as the Changeling Prince in a Hollywood adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and he begins splicing together clips from family vacations to create abstract, dreamlike films of his own. Anger's gradual, pained sexual awakening parallels his evolution as a filmmaker, and Lazar captures his struggles and sacrifices - the tortured, self-loathing relationship of the artist to his subject, the difficulty of making work so experimental and so explicitly gay - with great clarity. Nothing in "Sway" is writ large, but by carefully mapping the terrain separating the artist from the muse and the genius from the madman, Lazar makes the atmosphere of a decade almost palpable.
Adam Mansbach's new novel, "The End of the Jews," will be published in March by Spiegel & Grau/Doubleday.
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