Bigmouth Strikes Again

Books discussed:
How Soon Is Never? (a novel)
By Marc Spitz

Too Much Too Late (a novel)
by Marck Spitz

Meat is Murder (a novella)
By Joe Pernice


I don't know what I was thinking. I had already read Marc Spitz's "Too Much Too Late" and been disappointed at how the Spin magazine editor let a good premise go to waste. But "How Soon is Never?" has a premise that's just too appealing to me to resist. In fact, it's a premise I sort of came up with myself. Maybe I will post that next.

Anyway, the idea is that a guy who had been a teenage Smiths fanatic has grown up and decides that there's something missing from his life, and from the world. And that something is the Smiths. So, he sets about trying to get the band back together. And much hilarity ensues.

That's how I thought it was going to go, anyway. Instead, Spitz spends too many pages wallowing around in the present, with a character, Joe Greene, who seems very much like Marc Spitz, who's getting paid to listen to music and is doing lots of drugs and sleeping with lots of young women and feeling miserable about it. (Come on! He's a Smiths fan! Can't he be celibate and more or less sober and miserable?) We go to a long section detailing how the young Joe got interested in punk rock through falling in love with a punk chick when he spent a summer in Lexington, KY. I have spent a lot of time in Lexington, so I was eager to read this. But we really don't get a sense of what the town's like at all. Instead, we get lots of not very interesting detail about Greene's unrequited love.

Forward to Greene's New Jersey high school adventures when he discovers the Smiths. This part is more promising. Spitz, as a critic, has some understanding of how the Smiths were different and what they meant to their fans. I really like how Spitz describes Greene's discovery: Waiting all day by the radio to hear a Smiths song; Greene's platonic boy-crush on Morrissey; the thrill of going to a concert and seeing, for the first time, a whole room full of people who dress like you; the way that the Smiths can represent a boy's tender side, the side he tries to hide from the world as part of the process of becoming a man. Unfortunately, there's not quite enough of that kind of stuff here. Spitz weaves Smithsy themes into the storyline to some extent (you'll get "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" stuck in your head as you read the part about him driving around with his friends and thinking he could just die right then and be happy), but much of what Greene goes through could apply to a teenage fan of almost any band.

And back to the present, where the superannuated adolescent (30ish) Greene sort of tries to get the Smiths back together. Mostly, however, he just moons after Miki, a girl at work.

So, in short, the book needs less talk, more rock. It's more "The Boy With the Thorn in his Side" than "The Queen is Dead."

It gave me a new appreciation for Joe Pernice's novella, Meat is Murder, which was published as part of the 33 1/3 series of little books about great albums. It, too, was just another story about a depressed and horny teenager, but it was written by Joe Pernice, of Pernice Brothers fame. He's a better songwriter than novelist, but he's a good writer.