| 4th February 2008 09:58 PM |
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| Mel Belli |
Newsday.com
Lazar tunes into Rolling Stones for novel 'Sway'
BY STEPHEN WILLIAMS
[email protected]
February 5, 2008
The recipe for a history book about the Rolling Stones generally involves a healthy helping of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; author Zachary Lazar had dressed up his dish with a dash of mass murderer, a sprinkling of eccentric filmmaker and a spoonful of make-believe.
As a painter might do with a brush and canvas, Lazar uses words in his new novel "Sway" to fashion a restrained but seductive portrait of lives intersecting in the tumultuous 1960s - the star-crossed Stones; charismatic, psychotic killer Charles Manson, and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. And while his creation is grounded in fact, it is, in fact, fiction.
Sort of.
"So much fiction is closely drawn from fact," said Lazar, who is still boyish at 39. "The reason to do this was to get into the psychological aspects of these people in a way that a nonfiction approach precludes. I'm not after a photographic likeness of the subject ... it's the impression." He laughed. "That probably sounds kind of pretentious."
Over the hedge
Pretentious Lazar isn't. He lives on the East End, in North Sea, miles away - literally and figuratively - from the chic Hamptons scene. He teaches creative writing off and on at Hofstra University, and when he learned that "Sway" had been sold to Little, Brown and Company for publication, he was working another day job: pruning hedges at Grey Gardens in East Hampton.
"I knew then everything was going to be OK," he said. "So I finished the pruning."
A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Lazar is delighted that "Sway" - named in homage to the Keith Richards song on the "Sticky Fingers" album - has resonated with critics, and especially with people who witnessed some of the events he addresses: the Manson murders; the Stones at Altamont; the complex, finely drawn persona of the doomed Stone, Brian Jones. The fact that Lazar was an infant when those events unfurled is simply circumstance.
Los Angeles Times reviewer Mark Rozzo found that in "Sway" "the fun-house '60s are nothing so much as a hell of mirrors.... By highlighting the little-known links among Jones; Kenneth Anger, the notorious filmmaker behind such oddball, darkly camp creations as "Kustom Kar Kommandos" and "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome"; and Bobby Beausoleil, the would-be California rock star who became Charles Manson's murderous yes-man, Lazar has created a powerful, infernal prism through which to view the potent, still-rippling contradictions of the late '60s. It's no mean feat."
Over a plate of fried clams at Legal Sea Foods in Huntington Station, Lazar was low-key about this particular feat - he likens it to Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," except "his is much more nonfiction than mine" - but not about his affection for rock and roll as the takeoff point for "Sway."
"I did start listening to rock when I was 8. ... I loved the Stones, I was obsessed with them, they were so evil and glamorous at the same time. At 8 you're not supposed to have sexual feelings, but I keyed into something there. They just seemed ... well, that was what you wanted to be. By the time I was 12, I really wanted to be like that."
Cataloging and dissecting the '60s has been a cottage industry for writers since, well, the '60s. The political upheavals, the music, the drugs, the almost real-time televised brutality of the Vietnam War, the student backlash, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. were the fodder.
Whether Lazar's take on the decade is "accurate" may be beside the point. Author Dana Spiotta, whose highly praised novel "Eat the Document" was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, says some novelists "are able to write beyond their own experience. Fiction uses imagination as well as research to create convincing impersonations. I think 'Sway' does very well in this regard. I have no idea if Kenneth Anger was as Lazar depicts him, but he persuades me nevertheless."
Lazar, who grew up in Colorado, says he's yet to encounter much in the way of resentment from those who witnessed the traumas and tragedies of that time. "A lot of people of that age felt that I nailed it," he said. "That said, people feel proprietary about the '60s if they were alive then." Lazar is the first to realize that his book's critics "talk more about the '60s than the book. But I think there's this thing, that you want to establish your take on the '60s whoever you are."
Wanted to be a rock star
Lazar thought about being a musician once, but he "quickly realized that wasn't realistic." Books replaced the records, and Lazar took a course on French literature - in Paris, no less - where "you had to imitate the styles of great French writers. In French. Which was difficult. But evidently I wasn't bad at it. That was the first time I really wrote fiction. Figured if I could do it in French, I could do it in English."
"Sway," which began to take shape in 2001, is technically Lazar's third book. The first, in 1998, was called "Aaron Approximately," about an alienated boy's troubled childhood. A second book - "a big sprawling, Thomas Pynchon kind of novel" - was put on hold after 9/11.
By the new book's end, the kaleidoscopic cross-currents Lazar assembles for pages and pages fuse into a kind of violent, murderous coda that's finally wrapped in a vision of Mick Jagger in the studio; the Rolling Stones are recording. "He backs out and lets out a yelp, a monkey screech, saturated in echo," Lazar writes. "He makes grunting noises from deep inside his chest, rising on his toes so that his body shakes."
The song is "Sympathy for the Devil."
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc. |
| 4th February 2008 11:14 PM |
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| andrews27 |
Sounds like Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow.
[Edited by andrews27] |
| 5th February 2008 12:12 AM |
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| mojoman |
any relation to shelley lazar? |
| 5th February 2008 05:31 AM |
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| corgi37 |
Sway is a Keith Richards song??
WTF?
Not bad considering he doesnt play on the track!
But come on, lets all agree. If just 1 song typifies this mighty band, it is this 1 incredible tune.
To me, it is the perfect rock song. Fuck your "Stairways" or even "Satisfactions" - It's sway for me and always will be.
Gimme shelter comes second. |
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