How Soon Is Never?: A Novel [Paperback]

Marc Spitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2003

There is a light and it never goes out . . . or is there?

Welcome to the big Reagan ’80s, where ketchup is a vegetable and the Cold War looms large and chilly. If like Joe Green you were coming of age during this boom era, your main concerns include one or more of the following: a rainbow assortment of Polo shirts worn with the collar flipped up, K-Swiss tennis shoes, a new cable channel called MTV, and Top 40 radio. Stuck in the suburban haze of Long Island, New York, Joe Green knows there has got to be more to life.

However, salvation is on the way, in the form of a quiffed-up quartet from Manchester, England, who take over the airways of a local radio station. Hearing the Smiths for the first time jerks Joe awake: Morrissey’s wry and witty lyrics speak to him, and Johnny Marr’s driven guitar chords get under his skin. He destroys his Phil Collins cassettes, pomades his hair into New Wave submission, studies up on his Oscar Wilde, and falls in love. He even shows up for dinner on time. That is, until his favorite band breaks up and then breaks his heart.

Fast-forward some fifteen years. Joe Green is making a living as a rock journalist, still recovering from a wicked post-college smack addiction and slumming with youngsters who ironically “appreciate” the seminal ’80s music that once gave his life meaning. It’s too late to go home, or is it?

What if Joe Green can get the Smiths back together? What if reuniting the long-broken-up band can reverse the passage of time and bring back the magic of youth? What if it helps him win the heart of the woman he loves?

How Soon Is Never? is an acerbic, ingenious look at Reagan-era adolescence, the power of hearing a record that changes your life, and the dangers of nostalgia.

Be prepared to see a bit of yourself in Joe Green.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Jewish boy from Long Island parlays his New Wave rock music fandom into a quest for love in Spitz's sweet, winning debut, a coming-of-age novel-cum-quirky romantic comedy. Joe Green, Spin writer Spitz's alter ego, is a jaded, jittery and perpetually hungover music critic for Headphones magazine. He's "rocking out and getting high and living irresponsibly" in New York City-all part of the job description of working for a major rock and roll magazine-but he's beginning to worry he looks 40 in daylight, though he's only 30. The well-crafted first half of the novel flashes back to Green's experiences growing up as an alienated, latch-key kid on Long Island in the '70s and '80s who finds redemption in bands like the Clash, Depeche Mode, Devo and the Smiths. Spitz shifts gears when Green meets Miki, a comely co-worker who's equally frustrated with her empty, fast-lane rock and roll life. Matters improve when a new editor gives them the go-ahead for a landmark story: the two team up to try to reunite their beloved band, the Smiths. The scenes in which Miki and Green track down Morrissey and his mates work as the backdrop for the self-deprecating, would-be lovers' efforts to resist their attraction to each other. An engagingly acerbic style freshens the familiar material, and Spitz works hard not to run the Smiths conceit into the ground. The result is a first novel that skirts the usual cliches of rock tales and growing-up sagas.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

There has been a resurgence of interest in the pop music that exploded out of working-class Manchester, England, in the early 1980s. First there was the exuberant film 24-Hour Party People, a paean to the band Joy Division, and now comes this first novel-cum-homage to the Smiths. Dissipated music journalist Joe Green longs to reclaim the purity of his young rock 'n' roll soul. He fondly recalls his fellow high-school outcasts and their unquenchable enthusiasm for local alternative rock station WLIR, which led them to their greatest discovery: the angst-ridden music of the Smiths, whose songs made loneliness, sadness, and outrage seem cool. Although the band has long since broken up, Joe and fellow Headphones magazine employee Miki become obsessed with the idea of reuniting the band. They pitch the idea to their editor and are soon on their way to England, where they meet face-to-face with their personal rock gods while rediscovering their love for the music of their youth. An infectiously enthusiastic ode to rock 'n' roll. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; 1 edition (September 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609810405
• ISBN-13: 978-0609810408
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,015,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tragically true, January 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: How Soon Is Never?: A Novel (Paperback)

After finishing this book I think that I'm a pretty horrible kid. I picked it up because I'm a spin reader, and after reading marc Spitz's interview with himself I found it wonderfully cheeky that someone would package their life up as fiction for the sake of taking fabulous exaggerations and cruel observations. Similarly, I thought the picture of the two Spitzes talking to eachother in that october '03 issue, kind of neat.
Anyway. On to my roundabout point, one of the central themes to this utterly addictive saga is the favorite subject of many a music junkie; though covered with layers of drugs and jealousy, the main conflict is the connection that one feels to their favorite band. Not a normal connection, a strange one, the kind when the songs never get old; you can't accomplish anything with their records on because you know the music too well, you find yourself thinking about every aspect of your daily life in reference to them without realizing it, You have to seriosly consider if in the event of an emergency wether you'd save you mother, or their records. (you decide on the autographed record and the mother only because neither is replaceable)
I think that because Spitz is a music junkie it allows him to write from his own "life" with less of a degree of cheek than i'd forseen; mostly with honesty and a frightneing sense of devotion. This book is something to be feared, admired, envied, and most importantly read. I would recommend it to anyone who knows an obsessive music fan, even mothers of obsessed music fans, just so they can begin to understand what exactly is running through their children's minds.

This is it. This is your brain on the smiths.
However, I'm 14. I don't deserve this book. I'm too young to deserve this book. I read it for I felt that I was an old soul, but now? I wonder why I haven't found any band worth obsessing over. I'm worried that by the time they're here I'll be too old; or that they'll never come. Until then I have my guilt-trip, illegally downloaded, smiths collection. My dark rooms. My sunglasses. My woe. my teenagerdom that began tragically late. This book showed me that the smiths cannot be mine. I will try to have them, but indefinitely will fail.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars And all too soon I did return--just like a moth to the flame, October 19, 2003

By 

"a_sycophantic_slag" (New York, New York

New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Soon Is Never?: A Novel (Paperback)

Prospective readers, you're forewarned: you may lose track of time if you're reading this on your lunch break (or, uh, at your desk). It's definitely difficult to extricate yourself from this one, especially if your adolescence--which you haven't fully outgrown despite all chronological evidence to the contrary--was defined by the ephemeral beauty of The Smiths.

Damaged yet yearning, hapless ex-junkie-cum-downtrodden-bookstore-clerk-cum-voice-of-the-zeitgeist Joe Green knows very well how he got his name, and it's making him feel very mean indeed. Searching for purity & redemption amid the recent spoils of music industry success (read: excess) and the shadows of addiction, fractured family, and failed love, the narrator turns to the seminal songs that "made him cry and the songs that saved his life," crafted by defunct '80's band The Smiths. The first part of _How Soon is Never_? wistfully explores the formative (good and bad) influences in his life: musically, aesthetically, and emotionally.

Both on the anxious cusp of 30, Green and equally Smiths-obsessed coworker Miki hatch a plan to exploit their music-biz access by reuniting the band, despite lots of collective legal & emotional water under the bridge. They're convinced that the reunion will be momentous enough to wipe their respective slates clean. But Green is increasingly more concerned with his connection to Miki than that of the four Mancunians; and with the rediscovery of those songs come some of the painful feelings that the music helped as much to articulate as to transcend during his adolescent years.

Smiths disciples old and new will seek out Marc Spitz's bildungsroman, which serves quite charmingly as a testament to the special type of bedsit devotion the band inspired among those who fancied themselves "awkward and plain". But the novel's appeal extends to every former lonely teen whose life, in that passionate, territorial, uniquely adolescent way, was irrevocably changed by a pop song. _How Soon is Never?_ is strongest when waxing nostalgic. Spitz evokes that longing for identity & love very well, as Joe's transformation from isolated, Polo clad
middle-schooler who chooses Hall & Oates as two of his personal horsemen of the apocalypse to angry punk to sensitive Wilde-spouting bookworm unfolds. The two love affairs of that time period are well-rendered and poignant, as are his elusive friendship with a fellow prep-school outcast and, especially, the conflicted relationship Joe has with his n'er-do-well father, Sid. The book also succeeds as an amusing send-up of the "alternative" music press (Spitz likens successful rock journalists to vampires and pop-culture narcs, covertly moving among the young, feeding off their trends and selling them back their own pre-fab poison) and the fine line we tread between keeping it real as we grow older and becoming a sad hipster pastiche.

Most of all, it perfectly captures a fan's relationship to the music that offered hope and understanding when one needed it most, and the desire to revisit it when times are hard. A tender, witty and highly readable debut novel. I liked it very much.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bigmouth Strikes Again, July 12, 2006

By 

Dionne A. Wood (Parma Heights, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How Soon Is Never?: A Novel (Paperback)

Is historical pop fiction a recognized genre of literature yet? That's really the only way I can classify Spitz's book. Spitz is a writer for Spin magazine, which is readily apparent in the first few pages of this novel.

The story goes a little something like this: Joe Green is a thirty year old mess, which he's been off and on since his teen years. Joe was once saved by the music, and his hope is to be born again through the music. Sounds a little lame at first, and I admit to almost putting the book down during the first few chapters.

Get past the woe-is-me-my-life-is-a-mess-and-I'm-30 angst, and the real hero of the story emerges.

The Smiths.

Yup. The Smiths.

A gawky, spot-on, dysfunctional coming of age background story follows, where we learn of Joe's obsession with all things Smiths.

You remember The Smiths, and you know you listened to them. Maybe you didn't listen to them in high school. Maybe you started in your 20s, when they came into vogue again and made jukebox appearances in hipster bars in trendy neighborhoods.

And you remember those kids in high school who wandered the hallways like the ghosts of real kids. The kids who "...wore black on the outside because black [was] how [they felt] on the inside..." Joe was one of those ghosts, and he's spent his life up til 30 trying to figure out what that means.

Joe and a co-worker hatch a half-baked plan to get The Smiths back together again, whereby Joe also hopes to save his soul and clean up his messy life. A slightly harrowing tale ensues, largely fueled by cigarettes and booze.

I love this book for the nostalgia more than the plot. I fancied myself one of the misunderstood ghost kids during high school, and music was and remains a major part of my raison d'etre. Spitz's knowledge of the alternative sounds of the 80s and 90s is expansive and impressive. The overall effect of the read was like jumping in the way-back machine.

And really, how soon is now anyway?

(I admit to digging out my old Smiths cds and refilling my iPod after finishing this book. I can't believe I still know all the words.)