Customer Reviews

Sway: A Novel

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

 

 

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.

this book is amazing.

why not just go into your room, put on 'exile on main st', and 'sticky fingers' while paging through 'hollywood babylon' with 'helter skelter' on dvd?

because you will just get the same old thing, the incredible yet now hopelessly familiar cultural artifacts of the '60's choked with history.

this book strips the sense of future from these now famous or infamous people and reading it you sense the ordinary, even pathetic aspects of the characters who are now in our pantheon of gods.

the economic and social forces of the '60's and their implications are endlessly discussed, yet the nature of humanity, the individual odd isolated person is the true actor of all times and of this book. lazar lets those real individuals speak for themselves in a way not possible in real life. the keith richards of 1964 has been completely obliterated by the one whose autobiography is coming out soon (which i am eager to read but for other reasons!).

one thing we should have learned from history by now is that while we never truly learn from it, we do find some eras are more interesting to wallow in.

i can't think of many more interesting than this.

"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.

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.

In the opening pages of SWAY, author Zachary Lazar warns readers that "among other things, [the novel] is an examination of the way several public lives were detached from the realm of fact and became a kind of contemporary folklore."

Lazar, author of AARON, APPROXIMATELY, cleverly weaves three related stories that all contain larger-than-life characters and events that served to close the decade that was the 1960s. He tells how Bobby Beausoleil, a sometime musician and drifter, became a murderer under the spell of Charles Manson. Before his Manson family days, Bobby appeared in an experimental film by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who went on to blend that movie with another he shot with the Rolling Stones. One story bleeds into the other, showing how artistic euphoria can easily lead to madness.

Bobby was a handsome drifter bouncing around California trying to pick up gigs with his rock band when he happened upon a commune of sorts, on a deserted ranch in the desert. Its inhabitants all were under the sway of a man who purported himself to be a prophet and, at times, even Jesus Christ. Manson controlled every move his underlings made and soon demonstrated his influence by having members of his "family" kill for him. Bobby, who had begun an ill-advised affair with one of the Manson girls, was talked into participating in the murder of music teacher Gary Hinman, which precipitated the Tate-LoBianca killings by a little more than a week.

Before his disastrous association, Bobby had lived in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and made the acquaintance of Kenneth Anger, who was known for such controversial and artistic films as Scorpio Rising, and he wanted Bobby for his latest outing, Lucifer Rising. But after weeks of shooting, the tension --- sexual and otherwise (Kenneth, a somewhat closeted gay man, was attracted to the straight Bobby, and the two had several sexual encounters) --- took its toll. The pair had a falling out and Bobby fled with most of the film, forcing Kenneth to abandon the project and use what footage he had in his later film, Invocation of My Demon Brother, which also starred the Rolling Stones.

The Stones storyline begins just as the band, led by guitarist and founder Brian Jones, is starting to get a following in the clubs in the London suburbs. Brian had a strong vision for the band --- definitely more blues than pop --- but when fame and drugs came into the picture, that vision grew fuzzier, and exactly who was in charge of the band was up for debate. As Brian descended further into drugs and his destructive relationship with girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, he found himself more and more estranged from the band. With a U.S. tour pending, the rest of the group --- led by Mick, emerging as the heir apparent, and Keith Richards --- fired Brian from the band. A little more than a month later, Brian was found dead in his swimming pool at the age of 27.

Although over the years the actual cause of death has been disputed (some say that a builder who was living at the house killed him and confessed to the crime on his deathbed years later), it was reported on the death certificate as "death by misadventure." Around this time, Kenneth had relocated to London and met the Stones through an associate. Anxious to capture their energy and raw power on screen, he broached the idea of doing a film with Mick. The filmmaker arrived on the scene, Mick's power usurped Brian's and the outlandish singer soon discovered that he and Kenneth shared the same fascination with the occult, namely with the concept of the Devil. But as with previous relationships, Kenneth's fierce intensity scares away his leading man, and he is alone once again.

SWAY deftly blends three key times and places, indicative of the turbulent '60s, almost as a signpost to the end of that era. The stories are all connected and steeped in fact, but Lazar takes the fact one step further and it becomes persuasive fiction. The title can have a multitude of meanings, including being the name of one of the Rolling Stones's songs, but I think it speaks primarily to the notion of the dangers of falling prey to someone else's influence and how being under the "sway" of somebody can lead you to ruin.

--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller

Why imagine the 60's? Because it makes a lot more sense than trying to define or analyze them. This was the decade that imagined itself into being and still imagines us today: "Sway" meets it on its own terms. Lazar's imagination is disciplined, precise, a living thing. His evocation of the entwined lives of the Stones, Kenneth Anger, and a Manson accomplice is a riveting read.
If you've ever wondered about how those dingy, brilliant boys channeled Delta blues in sub-middle class mid-Atlantic Home Counties accents and put the edge on a generation, read this book. Lazar has wondered too and he's really good at it.

"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)

Thought this would be a stinker, but I loved it. Wonderfully inventive and compelling. Lazar made me interested in the Rolling Stones. His sections on Anger are beautiful.

What book do I suggest you take on vacation this summer? Well, if you're anything like me, you don't get much reading done on vacation. Still, I do have a recommendation: "Sway," a novel by Zachary Lazar.

So, what's it about? It culminates in 1969 after following events in the lives of avant-garde gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger (who wrote Hollywood Babylon), Manson family murderer Bobby Beausoleil and Rolling Stones founding band member Brian Jones. It's the story of three individuals on a collision course with history.

Lazar sketches compelling anecdotal portraits of each man. It's a talented storyteller who can leap from one thread to another, juxtaposing each episode with the skill of a master seamster. This is a non-fiction novel, thus we are treated to imagined conversations and voyeuristic observations featuring Manson, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Marianne Faithful.

Anger is the linchpin in three disparate narratives, interacting with Bobby as a friend, lover and director, and with Brian and The Stones as documentarian. Beausoleil is held sway by the manipulative Manson, Jones by his addictions and paranoia of being eclipsed by friends of superior talents and charms. Kenneth alone survives; a witness to violence, suicide and murder. "Sway" offers a bravura performance by Lazar.

I bought this book because of a lingering fascination/nostalgia for the period, and because I couldn't resist the seemingly bizarre idea of a fictionalized cultural history based on the lives of real people--people I had read about, listened to, or imagined countless times during my own youth. At the same time, I was pretty sure it was going to be a lot of pretentious drivel, and that I'd toss the thing into my basement library (where all half-read books go to die) long before I got to the last page. Surprise! I consumed it in one day. The writing was spare, the characters were finely-drawn and alive, and, best of all, it wasn't the least bit sensationalist. I'd been sure the whole Manson angle would play out in fairly gruesome terms, and that I would probably toss the book at that point. Although there was some violence, it didn't come off as gratuitous. And the Manson bits were more or less a "frame" for the larger narrative about the Stones in their early years. The only thing that annoyed me--and it was a very small thing--was the repetition of that phrase (quoted in the editorial review above) about everyone under thirty thinking they were exceptional--an artist, a star, whatever. It was pretty zeitgeist-capturing the first time I read it, but he used it again, word for word, later in the book. If the repetition was meant to be incantatory, it missed the mark--it seemed like a phrase of which the author was too enamored, and the repetition made it seem merely clever. Still, I thought the book captured the self-indulgent pseudo-depth of the era really well. Better, in fact, than any other novel I've read. I'd give it four and a half stars if I could.