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What
is the point of the rock novel? An author can use the milieu
of rock music to explore greater truths about the human condition.
The other obvious choice is straight satire, á la This
Is Spinal Tap. Shilling manages both with Rock Bottom,
a novel depicting the fall of a band of never-weres whose
grandiose dreams far surpassed any impact they would ever
have.
The members
of Blood Orphans—Adam, Shane, Darlo, and Bobby—and
their manager Joey are all familiar archetypes (there's a
nice guy, a sex addict, and a coke whore), but Shilling manages
to imbue them all with enough personality that they never
become stereotypes. The book begins the morning after a disastrous
gig in Amsterdam. As Shilling puts readers in the heads of
each band member in separate chapters, it's revealed that
Blood Orphans's record, Rocket Heart, is chockablock
full of laughable songs like "Double Mocha Lattay," with lyrics
like, "Once you go black, you'll never go slack." Critics
call it "criminally terrible," and say the singing, "make(s)
David Coverdale sound like Placido Domingo." As if that weren't
bad enough, people accuse several of the songs on the album
of being racist, and the record company ends up pulling the
CD.
It's
easy to feel bad for these hapless people—their outrageous
dreams have been crushed. On the other hand, what right did
they have to dream so big? Readers may find themselves wishing
for a little less hubris from the characters. But if they
were smart enough to be more realistic, the fall might not
be so funny.
Obviously,
greed and arrogance are themes in Rock Bottom—of
the band, and of the record label that must have seen dollar
signs to give Blood Orphans a huge advance. But there's no
sense as to why the record company thought they were so special.
It's insinuated that they play satirical heavy metal in the
KISS/Twisted Sister mode, which is not something that's commercially
viable today. And the novel is meant to be contemporary, as
people have cell phones and internet. It's clearly not the
1980s. As clueless as record company execs seem, it's unlikely
that a label would put lots of money behind a band like this.
That may be a problem for a book like Rock Bottom,
whose audience would probably know a few things about how
the industry works. Luckily, much of that can be overlooked
as the characters become more developed.
Underneath
the folly is a well-crafted novel that takes place in one
day and one place—adhering to the classical ideals of
unity of time and space, of falls from grace due to pride.
It also contains some lovely analogies, like when a potential
groupie compares Blood Orphan's fall to the painting Raft
of the Medusa by Géricault.
Beginning
the novel with their fall is what makes this novel satisfying.
Readers will initially sympathize with the band because of
the downfall. This makes their cluelessness about their obvious
racism and sexism a little easier to swallow, and their eventual
revelations about where they went wrong more satisfying. Characters
this complex can be hard to write, especially in books meant
to be comedic, but Michael Shilling handles this with little
difficulty. As the characters realize that their stereotypical
desires for sex and drugs are what got in them into this jam
in the first place, they become human enough that readers
will find themselves rooting for a happy ending for this hapless
group of retro rockers.
(January,
2009)
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