Sway: A Novel

by Zachary Lazar

Overview

Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316028363
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/07/2008
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	528 KB

About the Author

Zachary Lazar's previous novel, Sway (Little, Brown), was chosen as a Best Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, and his memoir, Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (Little, Brown), was named a Best Book of 2009 in the Chicago Tribune. Lazar is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. He lives in New Orleans, where he is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University.

Editorial Reviews

Lazar's second novel (after Aaron, Approximately) fictionalizes the 1960s, the Rolling Stones, Charles Manson, and Kenneth Anger, successfully capturing both the emotional and the emotionless, including a disturbingly stoic Manson before a murder and the confused, bipolar Rolling Stones on the rise-and sometimes on the run. The story shifts among the stories, linked by filmmaker Anger and actor Bobby Beausoleil, the latter of whom eventually joined the Manson family after acting in Anger's first film; considerable attention is paid to the Stones' internal conflicts, leading to the death of Brian Jones and the band's subsequent success. Although the story is a creative remaking of the 1960s, there is nothing particularly striking about the plotline because we know the end. The story seems like any other Stones biography placed side by side with Kenneth Anger and Charles Manson as a comparative device to bring out the horror. Yet this is also a compliment to Lazar, who's able to make his work seem like nonfiction, encapsulating the aura of the times in much the way that a film captures the essence of real characters. Recommended for large public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ9/15/07.]
—Stephen Morrow

Library Journal

The often self-destructive misadventures of "young people severed from all ties to the ordinary world" are chronicled in Lazar's alluringly creepy second novel (Aaron, Approximately, 1998). It tells three linked stories, each populated by iconic figures of the late 1960s. Beautiful-boy drifter and sometime rock musician Bobby Beausoleil wanders into the orbit of a charismatic "messiah" named Charlie, whose southern Californian "family" obediently isolate themselves in order to articulate his vision of uncompromising "love." A few years earlier, several young males survive a frigid winter in an unheated London flat, devoting themselves to the creation of a driving musical style compounded of ingeniously mingled influences and raw technical virtuosity. As Mick, Brian, Keith et al. become the Rolling Stones and their "aloof antistyle" makes them famous, an introverted California boy, Kenneth Anglemyer, having survived the late Depression years and converted his fear of his physically abusive father into an artistic passion, becomes a furtive homosexual cruiser and the celebrated underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, creator of such abrasive cinema as Scorpio Rising and Flaming Creatures. As pansexual Bobby glides in and out of Anger's life, the Stones grow ever more famous, abuse various substances and one another and attract the attention of the itinerant Anger-who sees in Mick Jagger's polymorphous perversity the "Angel of Light" Lucifer, for which role Anger had groomed the unstable Bobby. The novel moves swiftly, and Lazar handles the numerous segues from one story to another with a veteran film editor's finesse. The novel drags, so to speak, when focused on the Stones's sartorialcampiness, the suicidal shenanigans of their least energetic member Brian Jones and the sniping brought on by sexual sharing of notorious rock molls Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull. But the ending has a powerful kick, and we're still hearing its echoes. A skillful dramatization of the consequences of making and inhabiting your own world. The Stones ought to write a song about it.

Kirkus Reviews

"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...Elegant and intricate...this brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows, the most terrifying crannies of twisted souls, the darkest gleaming gems."— Charles Taylor, New York Times Book Review

"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

"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. Despite the era's nearly impossible richness, fresh insights are hard to come by."—Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

From the Publisher

"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

"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. Despite the era's nearly impossible richness, fresh insights are hard to come by."

Mark Rozzo - Los Angeles Times Book Review

"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...Elegant and intricate...this brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows, the most terrifying crannies of twisted souls, the darkest gleaming gems."

Charles Taylor - New York Times Book Review