Go Now

by Richard Hell

Overview

On the road with the Blank Generation, Go Now takes readers on a wild trip across the country and into the head of a down-on-his-luck punk musician.

Billy, a burnt-out, drug- and sex-addicted punk musician, sets out with his erstwhile French girlfriend, Chrissa, on a cross-country writing assignment that turns into a ricocheting, brain-searing, agonizing head trip.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684832777
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	06/25/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Richard Lester Meyers, better known by his stage name Richard Hell, is a singer, songwriter, bass guitarist and writer. Hell was in several important, early punk bands, including Neon Boys, Television and The Heartbreakers, after which he formed Richard Hell & the Voidoids.

Editorial Reviews

Go Now is vile, scabrous, unforgiveable, and deserving of the widest possible audience." ?William Gibson, author of Neuromancer "?guided by a ranging, meditative mind, the story becomes an emblem of how we live now. With candor the teller transforms blunders into the only shapely and reliably honorable offering that can be made of such materials: art. ?I was captive shortly after word one?makes Beckett?s despair seem chirpy. ?Billy?s most sordid plunges are rendered in a slit-eyed dryness worthy of Burroughs, but Billy is kin to Kafka and Bartleby, as well? Hell nails the autoerotic urgency of sexual hunger, our ability at the flick of a neuron to find everyone arousing, the landscape morphing into a mirror of our restlessness?" ?Laurie Stone, The Nation "What saves Go Now from becoming a queasy homage to self-indulgence is the clarity and verve of Richard Hell?s writing. ?a splenetic journey that delights in changing lanes from one genre to the next without indicating. Hell slews into the oncoming traffic of Hemingway, Henry Miller, and P.J. O?Rourke, but he has sufficient fury to hold his own. Go Now is a lucid, gritty chronicle that flings muck and questions at the reader in equal measure?" ?Times Literary Supplement "Hell?s brilliant junkie novel, Go Now, is prison writing from the lockup of the head, but unlike the majority of addiction testimony, narrator Billy?s sentences are hammered out of hard-won insights, snaking around your basic pillars of consciousness?loneliness, self-disgust, oblivion, and sex." ?The Village Voice

William Gibson

"?real insight and even beauty, not to mention that there?s something perversely fascinating about seeing the depths to which he sinks, resulting in a climax that?s by turns thrilling and sad." ?USA TODAY

USA Today

The big problem with Go Now, the debut novel by legendary punk rocker Richard Hell ("Blank Generation"), is that it wants so badly to be Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries that its sense of self burns away completely, leaving a trace about as memorable as the brown gunk in the bowl of a junkie's spoon.

The story follows Billy Mud, a burned-out New York musician, heroin addict and sex nut, who's hired by a rich businessman/rock impresario to drive a '57 DeSoto back east from California and to write about the experience. Billy's ex-girlfriend Chrissa will go along, taking pictures to accompany his prose. Billy spends most of the trip trying, halfheartedly and fruitlessly, to straighten out, and he litters the novel with musings that are flung at us like Ding-Dong wrappers from a car window: "I am vertiginous with the outpouring of tainted self-conscious atmosphere from inside me infecting and stripping the exterior, but worse having no effect on it at all."

When the novel lurches into Billy's final act of sexual depravity, we're probably supposed to be shocked and sickened as well as wrung out with compassion for this hopeless soul -- but by that point, we've been so flogged by his raw nerve endings that we can't feel much of anything ourselves. Hell's contribution to punk history is assured; this book just isn't part of it. --Salon

Stephanie Zacharek

A punk-rocker of modest renown and a self-styled poet, Hell debuts with a pointless and plotless fiction that lacks either the drug authenticity of a Burroughs or the transgressive aesthetic of an Acker.

A junkie's journal, this clumsily written narrative relies on the thinnest of premises: A punk performer named Billy Mud, kept from recording by a record company dispute, is hired to travel cross-country and set down his impressions while his sometime girlfriend takes photos. Despite empty gestures toward literary predecessors (on Baudelaire: "I identify with him a lot"), Hell, via Mud, mostly poses throughout as a super-studly anti-bourgeois rebel. Mud is so bored (he'd say "full of ennui") with his own story that he takes time to describe the physical dimensions of his notebook. And, of course, he describes the new wardrobe he needs if he's to blend in with the normals. Once on the road—no Kerouac he—he wastes away in motel rooms, planning how to score sex or dope. Luckily, his girlfriend Chrissa is French, so he benefits from the cultural dissonance—i.e., she falls for his tired act. The too- coolly ironic Mud, a self-described "outlaw," detoxes in Reno, but then decides to cop in Denver; he visits his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, where he and Chrissa bunk with his aunt, whose dirty underwear he sniffs prior to seducing her. When Chrissa catches him with his mother's sister, she catches a plane home: project canceled. Throughout, Mud's stream-of-drug-consciousness writing is laughably incoherent; his observations on drugs equally silly ("Junk is like an orgasm stretched in time"); and his commentary on America revealing of his own limitations ("America feels boring").

As a social critic, Hell sounds more like Paul Simon than Patti Smith. As a writer? Let's just say that rock lyrics aren't poetry, and addled scribbling not a novel.

Kirkus Reviews