Customer Reviews

Banned for Life

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

basically three books tied into one, all held together by unforgettable characters. i'm not a reader, nor a writer, but i cannot recommend this book enough. you'll laugh, you'll think, you'll wonder, some of the pervs out there might even get turned on...start this book and you won't stop until its done, then you'll start over, with a highlighter. don't be a &$^#*!!! vote with your %#$^# dollar and read this ^&$^#% book!!! with a little thinking, and a little imagination, and a little motivation, banned for life has the potential to save our souls.

. . . haney's debut reads almost like a memoir, and there's little doubt in my mind that he lived much of 'banned' . . . i'm a sucker for mysterious, self-destructive characters, and jim's a good one . . . i'd love to compile the soundtrack for the film adaptation of this one, in fact, 'banned for life' had me rooting through my old punk mix tapes . . .

Banned For Life hooked me in like a fish.

From the unforgettable first line to the final pages, its power, raging energy and raw emotion make this a pitch perfect punk anthem.

Essentially, it's a coming of age story complete with its own pounding soundtrack. It manages to combine punk sensibility with a strong storyline with a voice that is both achingly honest and nostalgic.

And it's as masculine as hell.

But it's a testament to Haney's ability, that he manages to craft the most womanly of characters in 'Irina' who is at once both unknowable and immediately familiar from the moment she steps onto the page. His innate sympathy and understanding of even the most complex characters makes you care enough about them to want to know what happens to them from the beginning right through to the end.

Although, it's very much of its time and place, it will have resonance for anyone who lived through the late seventies and eighties. Sprinkled with pop culture and political references, Banned For Life will make you feel like you are living alongside its likeable narrator, Jason. But then again, great writers are able to do this aren't they?

This is must for any self-respecting Gen X'er.

DR Haney updates the whole Kerouac/Beat aesthetic to include and conclude in punk rock. Actually, if things weren't so f'd up these days, there would never have been a conclusion. But there was, and by the time you're done with this book you pretty much understand why. Can't recommend it enough. The best rock `n' roll novel I think I ever read.

This is a love story. A story about embracing people you can't have, music you can't contain, movies you can't make money off of, and people too damaged by the sort of self-destructive brilliance that makes great art. We worship these people from afar, but are rarely in the car or the alley with them, mopping up teeth, realizing what the day to day cost of a true lack of compromise really is. This book captures that feeling, as well as a period of time when punk was vital, the Corporatocracy was presumed to be science fiction, and a path of resistance was easier to identify. Intellectual energy wrestles with a coming-of-age lust. Fiction throws elbows with memoir. New York pins L.A. to the tarmac. The notion of what "punk" might actually mean, as an adjective and an ethos far beyond the music, ultimately wins.

Banned for Life Will change your life.... it will tear you out of your complacent world and slam you down hard into a place where nothing is for sure, where a moment changes everything, where a song, a chord, a whisper can alter you forever. The book is shocking in its intensity and tender when it needs to be. D.R. Haney has created characters so real you'll imagine yourself hanging with them. They are funny, tragic and above all else - hopeful. Buy the book - you will end up talking about it for days afterward. I promise.

Banned for Life is about as punk rock a book as you're ever going to find. It's a narrative that moves across place, time, age and experience, from a young man's formative experiences growing up in (and escaping from) a country town where he doesn't belong to finding (and losing) a darkly sensual and addictive love in LA, and, finally, a search for both escape and a figure from the past who may or may not be a figure of salvation.

Not necessarily in that order.

The sheer amount of what is going on in Banned for Life is staggering; the richness of the story and the characters is underpinned by a kind of punk rock fury that surges and crashes throughout the interweaving snapshots of the narrator, Jason's, life. This is a book that contains both a coming of age, a loss of innocence, and the birth and death of ideas and ideals in the central characters. Highly recommended, especially for those who have ever wanted to see the world with its skin off.

I tell everyone I meet about this book. I can't seem to say enough about it. It's funny, witty, honest, and downright heartbreaking at times. D.R. Haney writes with such clarity that you feel as if you are a part of the story. I went where the characters went, no questions asked. There aren't many writers out there that can do what Haney does.

Twisted love story, shockingly real punk rock memoir, classic coming-of-age novel with the seamy side of fallen rock stars in L.A. and even some Euro history (Serbia) thrown in, "Banned for Life" has a lot going on.

This is almost two and a half books in one, but it's so well done the reader won't care about going off into another part of the narrator's story, but will be glad to get back to the heart of the novel. And yet, it's all the heart of the story; it's all important. No part of the novel feels like a digression because it's all excellent.

The voice of "Banned for Life" is spot-on--always sympathetic, never whiny, despite the ups and downs the narrator is describing. We've all been there (had ill-fated or frustrating love affairs, been betrayed by friends, etc.) and this is part of what makes this novel so relatable. At times, it can feel too real, almost exhausting in the way the narrator so accurately captures the angst-filled parts of life.

All in all, this is, however, a very powerful piece of literature. I am glad D.R. Haney wrote it, and I've been recommending this novel as much as I can.

In last January's issue of TANK*, D.R. Haney quoted Marlon Brando as saying "We've come to replace art with craft and craft with cleverness."

Haney's first book 'Banned for Life' seems hellbent on destroying all three. Born out of this is a type of raw fiction which redeems itself in the telling--a cocky confessional as introspective as it is explosive. It's a whopper of a book at 405 pages and crammed with enough story and cinematic scope to give peter jackson wet dreams, but reads like a devil's dictionary of exploits few of us have lived (or lived through) and far fewer have been able to execute with any authority in prose. What we're left with is an expansive first person account of punk and its discontents in the conversational/ confrontational style of Celine, the best of Lester Bangs "in the trenches" reportage and the unraveling lure of a contemporary Dashiell Hammett set to the pulse of the evolving culture of revolt.

Reviewing Haney's novel is almost as hard as free-associating a punk anthem. One can try to point toward sources the author nods to or shrugs off as he goes along without a backward glance but ultimately finds oneself with something indefinably original--this book, while reinventing itself as the story jumps between relationships, rivalries, times and locales giving cues toward Selby Jr., Melville or Mailer is, in the end, undeniably Haney.

'Banned for Life', much like one of its best creations--the miniature Travis Bickle/ Sid Vicious incarnate--"Peewee", rambles between youth and young manhood and the desolate environs of suburban North Carolina, NYC's lower east side, blase Los Angeles and war-torn Serbia "..in breathless monologues, veering from subject to subject like a house-trapped sparrow trying to find an open window."

A bildungsroman, cautionary tale, mystery and eulogy this book exposes the true vein of punk yet at the same time, and rarely so, is highly accessible and maddeningly readable to the outsider. For a novel spinning in orbit around the planet of Punk, its really a story of rare friendship, loss, renewal and revolt. One wonders if the events in this book were set at an earlier time if the main characters would be hitting the road with the Beats, setting the city on fire with the Red Faction Army, or calling for the head of Marie Antoinette.

An excellent debut.

*TANK (Volume 5 Issue 6) January 2009