BARNES & NOBLE | Sway by Zachary Lazar, Little, Brown & Company

Sway

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Sway (Reprint) Pub. Date: 2/10/2009 Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

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Sway Pub. Date: 2/10/2009 Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

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Sway Pub. Date: 1/7/2008 Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

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Overview

Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary new novel, SWAY—the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers. Lazar illuminates an hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence. Connecting all the stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful California boy who appeared in an Anger film and eventually joined the Manson "family." With great artistry, Lazar weaves scenes from these real lives together into a true but heightened reality, making superstars human, giving demons reality, and restoring mythic events to the scale of daily life.

"One hypnotic tone poem.... It is not the now-historic acts of violence that make Sway so riveting, but its vivid character portraits and decadent, muzzy atmosphere, all rendered with the heightened sensory awareness associated with drugs and paranoia. The near miniaturist precision with which he describes Keith Richards's attempts to master his guitar, Brian Jones's acid trips and Anger's obsessive desire for Beausoleil bring this large-scale tableau into stunning relief." —Liz Brown, Time Out New York

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
A novel of the '60s revealed in three intertwining narratives, Sway links the early years of the Rolling Stones, the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and a young itinerant musician, Bobby Beausoleil, who appeared briefly in an Anger film before joining the madness of the Manson family. Anchored in history, Sway is an evocative novel, dissecting the dark heart of a decade that began with such peace-professing promise.

The '60s unveiled a new freedom of expression, including new sounds and images, rock 'n' roll and independent filmmaking among them. Young men in bands became instant icons, their slashing beat and aggressive rhymes touching a dissonant chord no one fully understood but danced to regardless. The new cinema, less about plot than provocative sexual images, violence, and rapture, began to hold its own sway over the generation's most fertile minds. No one knew where it was headed, but everyone was on for the ride.

Lazar's novel unfolds as a series of quick cuts from one narrative to the next -- like the music and film it describes, it's inchoate and chaotic, finally colliding and gathering momentum toward a terrible conclusion. A masterful reimagining of a turbulent time, Sway is an ironic comment on the art and artists who prefigured this maddening decade and served as its dark inspiration. (Spring 2008 Selection)

Charles Taylor

With its motifs of homosexuality, Satan worship, drug addiction, promiscuity, nihilism and general decadence, Zachary Lazar's superb second novel, Sway, reads like your parents' nightmare idea of what would happen to you if you fell under the spell of rock 'n' roll…If there is a literary antecedent to Sway it's Gordon Burn's 1991 novel Alma, a masterpiece that provides another view of the era and is the greatest novel ever about pop culture. Its real kin, in ambience if not method, is Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's 1970 film "Performance," in which Jagger starred. Like that picture, this brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows, the most terrifying crannies of twisted souls, the darkest gleaming gems.
—The New York Times

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From The Critics

A s Mick Jagger sang in the 1970 song"Sway," "It's just that demon life has got me in its sway." In Lazar's second novel, he uses a number of real "demon lives" from the '60s-the Stones and their entourage; Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker who shot Scorpio Rising; and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician and Manson family associate-to channel the era's dread and exhilaration. Lazar shows the decade's descent as the culture of youth (represented most clearly by the Rolling Stones as icons of swinging London) responds to assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the repression in Czechoslovakia and the shedding of naïveté about drugs. Lazar sketches out his narrative through discrete episodes: Bobby's first criminal job with Manson; Anger's filming of Scorpio Rising; the breakup of Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones; and a series of Anger's failed film projects. Anger serves as the narrative's lynchpin, and Lazar could have easily cast him as a tawdry caricature, but to his credit, Lazar understands that, in the '60s, the marginal was central, and he brilliantly highlights the fragility of an era when "everyone under thirty has decided that they're an exception-a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star." (Jan.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780316113113
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Publication date: 2/10/2009
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 802,133
Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Zachary Lazar graduated from Brown University, has been a Fellow at The Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center, and received the Iowa Writer's Workshop's James Michener/Copernicus Society Prize. His first novel, "Aaron Approximately," was published in 1998.

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Blue_Goose

Posted April 6, 2009

Not impressed

Recommended by B&N staff and some good word of mouth around store, but overall, not very impressive.
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grumpydan

Posted March 25, 2009

more from this reviewer

Lost in the Sixties

I just finished reading Sway by Zachary Lazar, and am a little lost. He takes three actual people from the 60s (Brian Jones, Charles Manson and Kenneth Anger) and intertwine the real life events of their lives to make this novel. I did get the feel of what life was like in that time, and 'getting' to know the early Rolling Stones was fascinating but I didn't get the feel of what Lazar was attempting to do with the book.. He inserted a lot of actual events and then some fictional stuff too. The story was uneven. Did it even have an ending?
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