Since Mercury’s death, “new” Queen releases have been a mixed bag: on the positive side, Queen fans have been presented with the band’s “final” album (Made in Heaven), two relatively strong live albums from the ’80s, a couple of accompanying live DVDs, and the Freddie Mercury Solo Collection. On the negative side, fans (American ones in particular) have been bombarded with seven — seven! — greatest hits compilations (the eighth will be released later this month) and have had to endure the relatively depressing “Queen + Paul Rodgers” incarnation, including mediocre studio and live albums that nobody asked for. Queen fans still wait patiently for archival releases, including a long-anticipated, endlessly-postponed box set of rarities.

The one piece of excellent news for Queen fans arrives in the form of a new coffee table book, Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock. I can say without exaggeration that it’s the most exciting Queen release of the past 15 years.

Lovingly written and compiled by journalist Phil Sutcliffe, Queen: The Ultimate… is 287 pages’ worth of illustrated beauty, featuring multitudes of photos of the band throughout their career — many of them previously unpublished — and scores of memorabilia: concert programs, posters, domestic and foreign 45 singles, LPs, backstage passes, ticket stubs…you name it, it’s here, and there are over 500 photos in all.

It’s not just a pretty picture book, however: Sutcliffe has written quite the comprehensive biography of the band. It’s not as thorough as the Queen bio As It Began, but it’s not meant to be, either. What separates this book from others is Sutcliffe’s generous use of band interviews over the years, including many conducted by Sutcliffe himself. And though only the most hardcore of fans would have purchased the books written by Freddie’s partner, Jim Hutton, or his personal assistant, Peter Freestone (yes, I own both), Sutcliffe compiles the best supporting information from each of these books, and also gives special attention the final years of Queen — an especially touching period where the band rallied around Freddie to help him complete Made in Heaven.

Sutcliffe isn’t the only contributor to the book; each album in the Queen canon is reviewed in detail by rock journalists such as Jon Bream, Jim DeRogatis, Gary Graff and Greg Kot, while close friends of the band offer personal recollections. One of the most touching essays comes from Reinhold Mack, producer of The Game, Flash Gordon, Hot Space and The Works: not only does Mack recount the band’s work ethic in the studio, but offers a number of personal photos of Freddie and Mack’s son, “Little Freddie” (I’m not making that nickname up) who was also Freddie’s godson. A Christmas card from Freddie to Little Freddie is one of the most touching inclusions. Finally, the book includes “endorsements” of the band from other artists, such as Geddy Lee, Neil Diamond, Slash, Wayne Coyne, Tom Morello and others. While not entirely necessary (I’m not sure why I care what Adele thinks of Queen), they’re a nice finish to an breathtakingly beautiful book.

Having read numerous Queen books over the years, I thought I knew everything there was to know about this band — but Queen: The Ultimate… has provided me with new anecdotes and stunning visuals at every turn. It’s probably more than any casual fan of the band will need, but anyone with more than three or four Queen albums in their collection will find it to be absolutely indispensable and a welcome addition to their book collection. It is, quite simply, an absolute dream for all Queen fans.

“Maybe I’ll write a book that has all the sex-and-drugs stories from the early years and publish it after all of us are dead,” Clemons writes. “Nah, I can’t do that either, ’cause now all of us have kids and grandkids.”

But beyond the fact that you know a lot got left out of Big Man — a nickname Clemons says came not from Springsteen but from a little old lady in Bloomingdale’s — there’s another complicating factor: A lot of the stuff in it never even happened. Clemons and his writing partner Don Reo label a good number of the chapters “Legends,” and promise that those sections include “some fact and a lot of fiction.” It’s unorthodox, but just think of the trouble James Frey could have saved himself if he’d included the same warning.

Still, you’ve got to read between a lot of lines to get the complete picture of Clarence Clemons from Big Man, since the way it’s written relies less on historical fact and more on the personality of its subject. Fortunately, Clemons has plenty of that to spare.

In fact, the stories (both real and imagined) paint a vivid picture of a gregarious, grateful and complicated man who loves music the way some people love God or women or their own children, although Clarence loves those things plenty as well. He’s spiritual but foul-mouthed, and a womanizer who’s managed to remain close to all his exes, which says something about the confidence and affability of the man behind the horn.

But just because this isn’t a traditional memoir doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain some big reveals. The story about Robert De Niro confiding that he stole his “You talkin’ to me?” bit from something Springsteen said on stage is one classic moment. Clemons also comes clean about a much-publicized incident at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show: That’s right, Springsteen’s “patented knee slide” was apparently no accident.

That’s funny, but the Super Bowl actually provides the narrative climax for Clarence’s literary journey through Big Man — performing for the first time since his double knee replacement and in significant pain, he literally spent the whole time fearing he might tip over in front of a billion people.

The book doesn’t sugarcoat the physical problems that Clarence has had to endure to keep playing. His knees and his back have both betrayed him in recent years, and he reveals that he even suffered a minor heart attack. But he remains (at least in writing) almost unfailingly positive — Clemons knows he’s lucky to have the life he has, even if he does note that if he hadn’t met Springsteen, he’d still be playing music, just in smaller rooms.

But they did meet, and to hear Clemons tell it, his relationship with Bruce was special from the start: “I’ll tell you something, when we started to play that night we looked into each other’s eyes and it was like … total magic,” he writes. “My girlfriend said we were queer for each other. But it was so solid.”

Given that connection, it’s not surprising that the period when Springsteen dismissed the E Street Band to record and tour with different musicians in the early ’90s was so tough on Clemons.

In the book, Clarence describes the phone call he got from Bruce while on tour in Japan with Ringo Starr. He shares only his reaction, not Springsteen’s words, and describes how the scene ended with encouragement and an awkward hug from Ringo — who of course went through his own high-profile band breakup. The chapter doesn’t have “legend” in the title, so we can only assume it’s how it actually happened.

But besides those sometimes frustrating “legends” sections — trying to parse the fact from fiction can be maddening, as funny and well-written as they are — there’s also the contributions of Reo, a TV producer who clearly could pen a fascinating memoir in his own right. His role here, unfortunately, seems mainly to name drop and talk about how cool it is to sit right backstage during a Springsteen concert. (No kidding, Don.) A few of his sections could easily have been sheared.

That said, Reo provides a valuable glimpse of what it must be like to hang with the Big Man. “He shines from within and radiates a kind of … goodness,” Reo writes of Clarence. “He has the ability to distract you from the bitcheries of life.”

That’s also something that Big Man the book is more than capable of doing — along with giving you a good idea, however fleeting, of what it’s like to be, well, the Big Man. And it’s worth the price of admission just for that.

Jeff Martin, author of The Customer is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles (nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, has written his fabricated memoirs, My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize (Soft Skull Press).

As Martin lays out in the author’s note, “Some of the events described almost happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Others were stretched from the smallest inkling of truth. Others were stolen from other memoirs.”  Right off the bat you know this is going to be a silly ride. This whimsical, quick read — it’s only 128 pages, none of which is a full page and including plenty of illustrations — brought me a smile and chuckle as it follows Martin’s “extraordinary” life from his birth in 1980 to the year 2061. Martin’s approach to his so-called life reminded me of Woody Allen’s Zelig and, more obviously, Forrest Gump: Martin is continuously present at some remarkable moments in pop culture history. Some examples:

As a young boy he’s personally hired by Michael Eisner at the Walt Disney Company. Their relationship crumbles when Jeff, then 4 years old, mishandles the release of The Black Cauldron.

After completing second grade, Jeff takes a public relations job with the Michael Dukakis presidential campaign and advises the Democratic candidate to pose for cameras in a tank.

In 1990, Jeff is hired by Sub Pop Records to “trim the fat.” He quickly terminates the contract of Nirvana because their debut record didn’t sell enough copies. Despite this error in judgment, Jeff has the foresight to purchase stock in a flannel company just as grunge becomes popular.

Other achievements in Martin’s celebrated life include working closely with John Lasseter on the first Toy Story film, traveling into space and accidentally starting a fire on the Russian space station, Mir, and advising Springsteen as he completes The Rising. Martin also falls in love with a photographer, Molly. That fact I believe may be true.

I’m not sure if Martin is trying to make a statement with his book. On one hand, he could be observing how much importance society places on celebrity in our culture, that you only get noticed if you’ve made millions of dollars and hung out with rock stars. But that would almost contradict the manner he’s using to write his book. By taking up the style of a blog entry or Twitter update, a style that any person with a laptop can use, Jeff Martin shouldn’t have to have done so many great things for us to want to read about him. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the book, and it was merely an exercise in being clever. If that’s the case, then Martin succeeds.

My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize is clever, and the quick anecdotes are an enjoyable trip through the last 29 years of popular culture. I believe it would have been a stronger work had the ideas been fleshed out more, even to two pages. But if Martin is poking fun at the Twitter age, in which people expect the writer to get straight to the point without superfluous writing, he succeeds by just giving the bullet points of his fake life and letting us marvel in his fake greatness.

That Dan Brown was a terrible writer with a weakness for the sort of pseudohistorical conspiracy theories usually floated by college sophomores stinking of bongwater, we knew from his previous books. But what makes his latest The Lost Symbol truly annoying, as opposed to merely forgettable, is his use of so-called “noetic science” as a major plot point. Brown being inexplicably popular as he is, there’s already a ripple effect; BookScan indicates that Lynne McTaggart’s The Intention Experiment, which gets a mention in The Lost Symbol, is experiencing a spike in sales.

This is good news for Lynne McTaggart, who is, I’m sure, a lovely person — but bad news for those of us with fully-functional bullshit detectors. If noetics really is the next big thing, then we have reason to dread the water-cooler, these days, those of us who are interested in religion, or science, or both, and who resent the cheapening of both that comes of trying to fuse the two. Here’s Brown’s rundown on noetics — what we used to call “mind over matter,” back in the day:

[Katherine’s research] was a scientific tour de force — a massive collection of experiments that proved human thought was a real and measurable force in the world. Katherine’s experiments demonstrated the effect of human thought on everything from ice crystals to the movement o subatomic particles. The results were conclusive and irrefutable, with the potential to transform skeptics into believers and affect global consciousness on a massive scale.

“We have scientifically proven that the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought. …. The idea of universal consciousness is no ethereal New Age concept. It’s a hard-core scientific reality… and harnessing it has the potential to transform our world. This is the underlying discovery of Noetic Science.”

(Something about Brown’s prose always sound like he doth protest a wee bit too much.)

Now, Dan Brown knows a good idea when he steals one; the central conceit of The DaVinci Code was lifted wholesale from the conspiracy classic Holy Blood, Holy Grail. A couple of media sensations over the last few years have popularized the pseudo-science of noetics — the movie What the [Bleep] Do We Know!?, and the book The Secret and its spinoffs. It’s via one or both of these that noetic science most likely came onto Dan Brown’s radar. At least, it’s these two that I single out for blame and scorn today.

What the Bleep was a sleeper hit in 2004; it’s been described as a documentary, but it’s more of a manifesto, mixing talking-head commentary, SFX-laden representations of subatomic and biological phenomena, electronic music and dramatic interludes. It’s the same formula as Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking series Cosmos and its various PBS progeny — but populated wall-to-wall with quacks, cranks, grifters, and New Age wackadoos.

The dramatic sequences meander around the story of Amanda (Marlee Matlin), a photographer with an anxiety disorder, body issues, and bad luck in love. Her interactions with her kooky, free-spirit roommate and a series of mysterious strangers eventually bring her to wrestle with the classic big questions about life, love, and happiness.

The less said about these segments, the better, except to say that I felt embarrassed for everyone involved; but however clumsily scripted and horrendously-acted it is, Amanda’s story at least grapples honestly with the alienation and discontent of life. But whereas traditional systems of religious belief, in engaging with those issues, tend to emphasize the importance of the questions themselves — and of the way that pondering, itself, can reorient and stretch the mind — What the Bleep is relentlessly results-oriented. Not only do these eternal questions have answers, the film tells us — they all have the same answer: QUANTUM PHYSICS!

Why am I so miserable? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Why am I here? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Why is the world what it is? QUANTUM PHYSICS! Where does reality come from? QUANTUM PHYSICS!

Here’s the thing: if you’re going to use QUANTUM PHYSICS! as an argument-ender, you’d goddamn well better make a better case for it than the film does, otherwise it’s just New Age-speak for “the Will of God,” which cannot be questioned. Indeed, the film spent more time bulletproofing its ideas (“Well, you really can’t understand it,” says one talking head. “It’s very mysterious,” says another. “Nobody knows why it happens, but it does…” says a third. Shut up and don’t question, okay?) than it does actually explicating them — always a sign of a weak argument.

Here’s a fun drinking game for you. Watch this ten-minute clip of the film.

• Every time someone says something evasive, take a drink.
• Every time someone takes an unjustifiable leap of logic, take ten drinks. Just because.
• Every time Marlee Matlin sighs, take a drink.
• Every time an unsourced anecdote is presented as fact, claim to take a drink.
• Every time the words “QUANTUM PHYSICS!” are uttered, take a drink and do not take a drink, simultaneously.
• Every time someone says “We can’t explain it,” or some variation thereof, take a drink.
• Any time somebody actually explains something… never mind, it won’t happen.
• Any time somebody proposes a violation of Newtonian physics, untake a drink.

(You might want to have a priest and an ambulance handy.)

Are you dead of alcohol poisoning yet? Then YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT.

What these thinkers have done is to take Heisenberg’s axiom that “the observer becomes part of the observed system,” and, essentially, extrapolate that to “Your thoughts create your physical reality.” Now, getting from Point A to Point B requires, in this case, more than a leap of logic; logic must take a leap, a hop, and a running jump, then catch the crosstown bus for the airport and board the first plane to Crazyville.

Did I mention that the film was funded by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, which is run by a sixtyish hausfrau who claims to channel the spirit of a 35,000-year-old warlord from the lost continent of Atlantis? (Funny how Donovan never mentioned him.) And that most of the film’s “experts” are affiliated with the Ramtha school — some impolite people call it a cult — in one way or another? And that at least one of the talking heads has disavowed the film, claiming that selective editing make him appear to espouse ideas that he in fact disavows?

There’s some valid science here, but it is degraded by the distortions, half-truths, and inconsistencies. The film’s science and its philosophy are both hopelessly muddled and self-contradictory — at once simplistic and needlessly complicated. One of the first things the film does is dismiss out-of-hand the materialistic, mechanistic electrochemical model of consciousness. All well and good. But then it goes into the mind-body connection, and starts undercutting its own argument. There’s a major thread about “addiction,” in its various forms, being responsible for most human misery. It’s not a surprising stance for the makers to take — New Age spirituality, remember, grew largely out of twelve-step recovery and self-help programs — and there’s a good deal of material about the physiology of addiction, about neuropeptides and drugs rewiring the brain — all, as far as I know, good science, albeit horribly illustrated. Feast your eyes on this slice of nightmare fuel, and feel the dawning horror when you realize that this is someone’s idea of high hilarity:

But that science depends upon the very same electrochemical model of consciousness that the film has already explicitly rejected. There are other traditions of dealing with the same problems — the Buddhist concept of attachment, for instance — but which do so on a pure-spirit level. So why didn’t they lean on one of those instead? Because attachment isn’t a scientific concept, and addiction is. But therein lies the problem: instead of lending the rest of the film an authenticity-by-association, the good science of the addiction material only makes the rest of the film look weaker by comparison. They haven’t just shot themselves in the foot here: they’ve blown the leg clean off.

There’s a similar problem with the sequences on theology and religion. Our God-concept, they say, needs a major overhaul: the “big man in the sky meting out punishments and rewards in the afterlife” model is obsolete and limiting. Fair enough. But the filmmakers don’t seem to have the confidence that the argument will stand on its own, so they wrap it in cheap shots at organized religion, while demonstrating no real knowledge of current theological thought. to watch this film, you’d think we were still living in the fucking Burning Time; to present the Big Daddy idea as the current dominant model means ignoring the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Merton, John Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong — ignoring everything since St. Augustine, in other words (and great chunks of Augustine, for that matter).

And, y’know, people who obey the channeled spirit of a 35,000 year old Atlantean warlord ranting against the primitive superstitions of Christianity — well. Glass houses, and all.

Anyway. What’s going on here is what theologian Karen Armstrong describes in her new book The Case for God — religion letting science define its agenda even on its own turf, instead of insisting on the primacy of the practice of faith. Now, rationalism and the scientific method are invaluable tools for perceiving and understanding the universe — perhaps even the best tools — but they are not the only tools. Faith is uniquely suited for some tasks of perception. Science is primarily descriptive — it’s all about the how; religion concerns itself with meaning, or the why. And you need both, I think, to get a well-rounded picture of the world.

It’s a matter of matching the tool to the job at hand. Writing about music is, famously, like dancing about architecture — but applying the scientific method to religious questions is like putting a sonnet under a microscope; looking at scientific question through the eyes of faith is like psychoanalyzing a mountain. Per Richard Dawkins, “Why are we here?” is, from a scientific standpoint, not even a question worth asking. And he’s right, as far as it goes. I would venture further that “How old is the Earth, and what’s up with the dinosaur bones?” is not a question worth asking in a religious context.

But religious thinking — process-oriented, poetic, allusive — has become disreputable, even among the religious, and so they take up the hammer of scientific thought — results-centered, descriptive, concrete — and try to apply it to existential questions. Instead of pondering the origins and immortality of the soul, they’re trying to figure its weight in grams. Instead of contemplating the impact of loving thoughts on a single human life, they’re quantifying their effect on the formation of ice crystals. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

The DVD of The Secret, by contrast, is a bit more open about its mystical leanings, if no less embarrassing. Shot on cheesy video, largely lacking in the shiny production values of What the Bleep, The Secret looks like something you’d find late at night on The History Channel — not one of the classy World War II documentaries, but some “History of Sex” thing. There are fewer physicists in the roster of “experts,” and more authors and philosophers, and at least one whose occupation is listed as “Visionary.” (I’d love to see his business card.) It doesn’t make much of an effort to explain away its premise with subatomic particles or the like; it’s down with the magic. And while it pays lip service to personal fulfillment and all that jazz, it’s much more shamelessly materialistic than What the Bleep. Screw changing the world; The Secret is mostly about Getting Cool Stuff.

The Secret takes What the Bleep’s distortion of Heisenberg and extends it even further, into what it calls “The Law of Attraction” — the notion that human beings create their own circumstances by the power of (largely unconscious) thought — which it backs up with scanty anecdotal evidence. There’s no arguing with the premise that if you change your attitude, you can change your life, but The Secret gets cause and effect backwards. A better attitude doesn’t attract success to you — it gives you the strength to go out and find success. It’s self-actualization for people who want to duck responsibility. Ultimate credit or blame must go to the Universe, after all; all I’ve done is be clever enough to game the system. Anyone can do it.

And in both What the Bleep and The Secret, it’s presented in exactly such an obnoxious, triumph-of-the-will way — “Everyone is a god! Well, I am, anyway — me and the people who are clued in, who don’t buy into the paradigm propagated by the mediocracy, the ones who have the courage to stop being sheep and take the red pill!”

But what about those who aren’t clued in? Well, now, there’s the rub. Noetics, and the Law of Attraction, and the highly-selectively-defined QUANTUM PHYSICS! of What the Bleep do fail to qualify as religious expression, I admit, if we take as given that all religion must encompass compassion for the misfortunes of others. The “your thoughts produce your reality” model precludes any compassion; the poor, the sick, the developmentally disabled, the mentally ill — well, no one’s coming out and saying they deserve their fate, exactly. But they have chosen it. And so it is not my responsibility.

And so noetics moves from the realms of the pointless and misguided and into the arena of the truly reprehensible.

When does a girl become a woman? Is it a biological or a psychological phenomenon? Likely a combination. Important signposts along the road: First bra. Actually needing one’s first bra. Menstruation. First love. Starting to shave one’s legs and…other things. First sex. First orgasm. (Note that those last two don’t necessarily go together.) Personally, I feel that I reached such a milestone on my thirteenth birthday, but not because of my age – because of a book.

I remember opening my presents that spring morning. There may have been some now-forgotten items of clothing among them, but the other stuff is still vivid in my mind. First, Whitney Houston’s debut album (on vinyl). Then I unwrapped a paperback, thick, with a spooky cover: a girl’s face, looking like she was holding a flashlight under her chin in a dark room. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. Thanks, Mom and Dad. They wouldn’t let me go to R-rated movies but I could read anything I wanted. I knew I would start reading on the bus on the way to school. Soon, I would be sucked into a literary obsession, lost in a world of Southern gothic psychodrama from which I would never completely return.

In a nutshell (a sick, sick nutshell), Flowers in the Attic is a late-’70s bestseller about a newly pubescent girl who, along with her three siblings, is hidden in the attic of her grandparents’ mansion so her mother can collect an inheritance. For three years, these extremely blond children are tortured by their bat-shit crazy grandma, who whips them, starves them and poisons them while telling them they are the spawn of Satan. Deprived of sunshine and fresh air, the youngest two fail to thrive, leaving them with little kid bodies and big kid heads. Meanwhile, the oldest girl and boy get super horny and…well, you can imagine where that goes. After tearing through the entire 400 pages in about three days, it was off to the bookstore to buy the next one in the series.

Oh yeah, it’s a series.

Over the years, this sad quartet and their progeny experience everything from miscarriages to sexual abuse to gangrene to arson, with lots of dialogue like “Damn you to hell, Mother!” punctuating the madness. And to think I had been wary of Ms. Andrews’ oeuvre at first because the cover art gave me the willies. (Then again, I was the kind of kid who was terrified by movies like Gremlins.) I zipped through all seven of her novels in a matter of weeks. So did a number of my friends, to whom I would pass on my copies; they would show up at school every day with glassy eyes from having stayed up too late reading about crazy hillbillies selling their kids and disemboweling hamsters (Heaven) or a woman copulating with her husband on her own grave (My Sweet Audrina). We were (mostly) good girls fixated on (very) bad people.

With all this drama occupying my mind, I’m not sure how I managed to graduate from seventh grade. It was all V.C. Andrews, all the time. I started writing a Flowers in the Attic screenplay. I made mix tapes for the soundtrack. Madonna’s “Live to Tell” seemed especially apt, so I used it as the basis for a short ballet, choreographed and performed by myself and two close friends for our class talent show. That summer at camp, while other girls were making lanyards and sneaking off to pull pranks in the middle of the night, I was spreading the good word about V.C. Andrews. “Isn’t that the one where they’re all going bonkers and raping each other?” my skinny British counselor sneered. I was undeterred by her dismissive Eurotrash attitude. At the end of the summer, I had not, sadly, learned how to double-dutch, but I was presented with “The V.C. Andrews Award” for my work as the self-appointed expert of mass market paperback puberty horror.

As deep as it may burrow into our tender souls, adolescent obsession isn’t built to last. Two tragic events brought me, kicking and screaming, back to a world not populated with lecherous uncles and homicidal half-sisters. First, V.C. Andrews died. Her publisher promptly hired a ghostwriter – a former high school teacher, no less – to complete books she had left unfinished and begin new ones under the Andrews name. I read a few, trying to recapture the feeling of the original novels, but they all seemed like fan-fic rather than the real deal. (Ironically, “V.C. Andrews” has published dozens upon dozens more books posthumously than she did while she was alive.) A year later, a film based on Flowers in the Attic was released. A fellow Andrews-freak joined me on a cold Saturday morning for the earliest showing. The movie should have been a slam dunk: I mean, how do you screw up a story jam-packed with Biblically-inspired violence and pastries sprinkled with arsenic?

They found a way. Everything was wrong. There’s such a fine line between over the top and overdone. I arrived at the theater expecting to see a psychotic old lady driving a pair of hot young people into an incestuous passion. But some genius at the no-name production company must have decided that the brother-sister coupling was no big deal, because when the lights came up, the most they had done was hug one another very tightly. It was as if Rhett Butler had turned to Scarlett and said, “Hasta la vista, baby,” or Rosebud had turned out to be a brand of chewing gum. Damn you to hell, Hollywood!

The world had gotten its hands on something important to me and millions of other sexually repressed, over-imaginative teen girls and spoiled it with their pathetic inability to appreciate its glorious filth. Like Cathy, the narrator and main character of Flowers in the Attic, I carried a burning desire for justice deep inside for years. Unlike her, I did not feel the need to seduce my mother’s husband to achieve it. My method of healing was far less gross and destructive: I wrote something. Specifically, I wrote an academic paper for a Master’s program, in which I linked Andrews’ novel to Medea, Grimm’s fairy tales, Jane Eyre, Freud’s theory of the uncanny, and oral contraception. Don’t be surprised if you see this paper published one day, in your favorite bi-annual women’s studies journal. There are a lot of us deep-thinking chicks out there, hanging out in the murky space between fear and fantasy.

On one level, there seems little point in reviewing a Dan Brown book. He’s big enough now that he’s critic-proof, and my little barbs will penetrate his mighty armor of public adoration not one jot. But you know, sometimes criticism isn’t about influence; sometimes, it’s a matter of conscience. And on the matter of The Lost Symbol being a terrible book — abysmally written, ludicrously plotted, resting on a foundation of knuckleheaded historical speculation and flat-out pseudo-scientific wrongness — I will not be silent.

You don’t have to be a great writer, Lord knows, to achieve popular literary success. But has there ever been a worse writer than Dan Brown to ever become so successful? It’s a trick question, of course, because there’s never been a writer quite as successful as Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than all four Twilight books put together — more copies than the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fa chrissakes. J.K. Rowling has sold more books overall, but no single volume of the Harry Potter series has racked up Da Vinci Code numbers.

Besides, Rowling is — despite her huge and glaring flaws as a prose stylist and a systematic thinker — pretty good with character and mood. She’s still a terrible writer, but she’s a slightly more lustrous shade of terrible than Dan Brown. True fact, The Da Vinci Code is not a good book, and Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, carries on in the tradition. And if you haven’t read it and intend to, be warned: from this point on, I will be SPOILING like mayonnaise in a hot car.

I have a theory. It’s not a literary theory, but a theory of personality — Dan Brown’s personality, to be precise. See, I figure Dan Brown probably enjoys all the perks of being a writer (who wouldn’t?), but is not much interested in the craft of writing. The Lost Symbol is all plot and ciphers (one using the “pigpen” code from that one issue of Boy’s Life, another apparently created in MS Word with Zapf Dingbats), told with about as much verve or emotional heft as a Will Shortz back-page puzzle from the Times. Or maybe — and this is perhaps a better comparison — as Myst; the structure and lack of emotional affect make the whole enterprise feel like a video game. Stuff happens. Puzzles are solved. Move to a new location — a new level — and start the process again.

But there’s no sense of joy to Brown’s work, no sense that he’s having a good time telling stories and making stuff up. An editor of my acquaintance talks about “the delight factor.” Rudy Rucker calls them “eyeball kicks” — the little jolts that good fiction gives you on nearly every page — and I take him to mean kicks in both senses of the word; both of a violent jarring sensation, and of getting your ya-yas out. They’re both talking about the pleasures of a text — the shape of a well-made sentence turning in your ear like a key, or way a startling simile seems to fall from the sky, or the way a character can with a single action summarize both his charms and his vices. Brown gives you none of that.

The wondrous thing about writing fiction is that it gives you a chance to be someone else for a while, to walk around inside other people’s heads, to see the world as they do, to think as they do. An author of fiction, though a pacifist himself, might write a passionate defense of preemptive military action; an atheist might assume the voice of a believer, or vice-versa. You can stretch out, and try on attitudes and perceptions antithetical to your own. (In fact, if you’re playing fairly with your characters and your audience, you pretty much have to.) But there is one experience, one trait that cannot be successfully imagined from outside — and that’s smarts. You can’t convincingly write a character who is cleverer than you are.

And that’s a problem for Dan Brown. His hero, Robert Langdon, is supposed to be a brilliant scholar (in the fictitious discipline of “symbology,” which entails elements of comparative religion, art history, and cryptography, as the plot demands) as well as an internationally best-selling author, sought-after public speaker, beloved professor, and one-time All-American water polo champion. Now, Brown surely sells a lot of books, and for all I know he swims like a fish, but friends, I’m here to tell you: he’s no towering intellect.

This extract, from early in the book, first sounded my warning bells. Langdon — whose Harvard lectures are so popular that he has to teach his class in the Sanders Theater — is speaking about Masonic symbolism. One of the students opines that the whole thing sounds like “a freaky cult.”

Langdon feigned a sad sigh. “Too bad. If that’s too freaky for you, then I know you’ll never want to join my cult.”Silence settled over the room.

The student from the Women’s Center looked uneasy. “You’re in a cult?”

Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.”

The class looked horrified.

Langdon shrugged. “And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.”

OH SNAP! YOU GO, ROBERT! Freshmen beeyotches = PWNED!!!one!

(A note on usage, by the way: In the face of passages like that one, many reviewers resort to writing in a pastiche of Brown’s style. I won’t be going that far — the stuff is beyond parody, frankly — but for best results I recommend that all quoted passages be read to the accompaniment of this soundtrack.)

Anyway. That, right there? That’s a dumb guy’s idea of how smart people talk — a thunderously obvious “insight” served up as a blinding revelation, all with a faux-urbane attitude (after dropping that little bon mot, Langdon literally winks; Constant Reader, I threw up a little). Brown is constantly rigging the game, surrounding Langdon with dimwits easily-impressed by his genius, when in reality it’s hard to imagine a class of high-school freshmen being wowed by Langdon’s little pagan-day-of-Ra stunt, let alone Harvard students. Secondary characters emerge whose only purpose is to ask Langdon leading questions. For instance, there’s Inoue Sato, head of a special CIA investigative unit; here’s her half of the conversation stretching across pages 79 and 80 of the hardcover:

And why would Peter Solomon say that if it weren’t true?

Did he explain why Peter thinks you alone can unlock the portal?

In all of your discussions with Peter, he never once mentioned to you anything about a secret portal in Washington, D.C.?

I’m sorry? The man told you specifically what this portal leads to?

So you’ve heard of the secret he believes is hidden here.

Then how can you say the portal does not exist?

You’re saying the secret he believes is hidden in Washington is a fantasy?

And yet it’s still around?

So what exactly are these… Ancient Mysteries?

Dangerous in what way?

Tell me, Professor, do you believe such powerful information could truly exist?

Well, Terry, I’m glad you asked. You really are the best interviewer in the business, you know.

That sense of being able to out-think the characters (and the author) effectively kills a lot of the suspense of The Lost Symbol; for a thriller, it’s remarkably unthrilling. The villain’s true identity — which is supposed to be this huge, hairpin plot twist — was telegraphed from so far away that when the big reveal came, I was actually confused: Didn’t we find out who he was, like, fifty chapters ago? Then I realized that although, I the reader had worked it out some two hundred pages previous, the characters had not yet figured it out — further undermining the notion that they’re all exceptionally clever and capable individuals.

(That being said, Brown did pull off one very neat third-act reversal that I never saw coming, with a resurrection act as audacious as it is implausible. So, um, yay? I guess.)

In part, my confusion probably stems from Brown’s maddening repetitiousness. He seems to ascribe to Army training standard of communication: “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” If a plot point or event is at all important, it will be mentioned again, and often. It may be inherent — Brown himself admits he has a short attention span — or it may be by design, an acknowledgement that his books are designed to be read in short bursts during airport layovers and subway commutes; but for the reader who’s plowing straight through, it gets annoying quickly. At 500+ pages, The Lost Symbol is a long book in which comparatively little actually happens — the action takes place in a single 12-hour span — and even with the 2-page mini-chapters and micro-climaxes, a rigorous edit could have trimmed a hundred pages or more with no loss in readability. There are a lot of recaps and much that simply feels like padding. (Then again, it wouldn’t do for a beloved author to break a long silence with a slender little book, would it? You’ve got to make people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, after all, especially if it’s an audience that doesn’t otherwise buy many books — and you’ve got that multi-million dollar advance to justify.)

As for Brown’s much-vaunted research, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. He throws around esoteric terms and factoids, but without any sense that he really understands them or their significance. That was bad enough with the conspiracy-theory and pseudo-history of the previous books. But when he starts in with the mysticism central to The Lost Symbol, Brown demonstrates that you can’t just bluff your way through metaphysics. Here he’s talking about the Solomon siblings, old friends of Langdon’s. Katherine is a research scientist, while Peter is a scholar of religion and philosophy. They’re working together in a discipline called Noetic Science (of which more later):

Katherine and Peter had pooled their favorite texts here, writings on everything from particle physics to ancient mysticism. …. Most of Katherine’s books bore titles like Quantum Consciousness, The New Physics, and Principles of Neural Science. Her brother’s bore older, more esoteric titles like Kybalion¸ the Zohar, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and a translation of the Sumerian tablets from the British Museum.

By the way, if you think for a moment that Dan Brown has read all (or indeed any) of those books beyond the jacket flaps, I’ve got a painting in Paris I’d like to sell you. Peter is trying to convince Katherine that a lot of modern scientific theory is anticipated in the work of ancient sages. There’s a lot of hand-waving about Heisenberg reading the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, then this:

“I want to study cutting-edge theoretical physics. The future of science! I really doubt Krishna or Vyasa had much to say about superstring theory and multidimensional cosmological models.”

“You’re right. They didn’t.” Her brother paused, a smile crossing his lips. “If you’re talking superstring theory…” He wandered over to the bookshelf yet again. “Then you’re talking this book here.” He heaved out a colossal leather-bound book [The Complete Zohar]… “Thirteenth-century translation of the original medieval Aramaic.”

…Katherine studied the page. …[T]o her amazement, the text and drawings clearly outlined the exact same universe heralded by modern superstring theory — a ten-dimensional universe of resonating strings. As she continued reading, she suddenly gasped and recoiled. “My God, it even describes how six of the dimensions are entangled and act as one?!” She took a frightened step backward. …. “You’re saying the early mystics knew their universe had ten dimensions?”

“Absolutely.” He motioned to the page’s illustration of ten intertwined circles called Sephiroth. “Obviously, the nomenclature is esoteric, but the physics is very advanced.”

Also, check it out: how many Commandments are there? That’s right. Now, d’you want to seriously get your lid flipped? Okay. Go ahead and count your fingers. Both hands. Go on. I’ll wait. See what I mean? I know, right? How could they have known?

Now, admittedly, I’m no expert on the Kabbala, and my knowledge of the tenfold Sephiroth has been mostly picked up from comic books — but I know glib, opportunistic bullshit when I smell it, and this is a shitknife that cuts both ways; Brown is trying to use cutting-edge science to make ancient philosophy seem relevant, while simultaneously using ancient philosophy to make cutting-edge science seem spiritually important. But in order to find the lowest common denominator between the two disciplines, he’s got to dumb both sides of the equation down so far that the passage has the opposite effect, cheapening both physics and mysticism. (And again, note the weakness of the writing — the strained, clumsy imagining of how smart people talk to each other, and the attempt to make the material convincing by sheer force of emphasis, including repeated use of the “?!” typographical construction, which I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen in print outside of, well, a comic book.)

So what are the metaphysical underpinnings of the Lost Symbol, exactly? What shattering truth about human nature and forbidden knowledge sets this plot grinding into motion? For that, let’s take a look at a clip from 1978’s Circle Of Iron, a.k.a. The Silent Flute. The irritable poodle-haired muscleman is our hero, and he’s spent the whole movie questing for a mystical book that contains within it all the secrets of the Universe. This sequence is the big payoff. Sit back and tighten your hat, friends, because your mind, she is about to be BLOWN:

Dan Brown, God bless him, aims for that level of profundity. Indeed, there’s something almost touchingly credulous in his worldview — not just his childlike faith in the mass media’s ability to rouse the masses to action (In the book’s other main plot thread, the huge crisis that everyone is trying to avert is the uploading of hidden-camera footage of the Washington Freemasons lodge to YouTube, lest the sight of high-ranking U.S. officials play-acting with skulls and daggers spark a firestorm of anti-Masonic fury that could bring down the government. No, really, that’s the threat.), but the book’s apparent wholesale endorsement of Noetics — a “discipline” that strives to justify metaphysics by cloaking it in science, to the detriment of both.

A man’s free to believe what he wants, of course, but one likes to think that a writer of thrillers is necessarily a bit hard-headed, a bit bloody-minded. Not so Dan Brown. For an ostensible thriller, The Lost Symbol isn’t terribly suspenseful. The autrhor seems less interested in making us sweat than in educating us — even, God help us, in uplifting us. And thus the feel-good piffle of Noetics, which lies roughly on a level with Intelligent Design on the despicability scale. All that guff about weighing the body immediately after death to establish that the human soul has a physical weight, or that dying plants revive in the presence of prayerful thoughts? That’s Noetic science, in its crudest form — tailor-made for gullible chumps who believe everything they read in forwarded e-mails.

Or that they see in stealth-marketed propaganda films for daffy New Age cults. The notions behind Noetic Science have gone mainstream with the movies The Secret and What the [Bleep] Do We Know?, which is how I suspect they came onto Dan Brown’s radar in the first place. Those movies, and the pseudoscience they espouse, deserve a takedown of their own — which is exactly what they’ll get in the next column. Yes, friends, it’s a two-part exclusive How Bad Can It Be? hatestravaganza; my knives are out and sharp and I do hope you’ll stay with me. Trust me: Your mind = GUARANTEED BLOWN.

Since then, Hornby has broadened his thematic horizons to encompass religious fervor (How To Be Good), suicide and therapy (A Long Way Down), and teen pregnancy (the “young adult” novel Slam) – all, unfortunately, with returns considerably diminished from his earlier work. In fact, his most essential work of the last decade was a nonfiction immersion into his music fandom: the essay collection Songbook (titled 31 Songs outside the U.S.), which explores his emotional attachments to tunes by artists ranging from O.V. Wright to Royksopp. Any Popdose loyalist who has not already picked up a copy of Songbook should do so immediately.

With all that in mind, it was welcome news indeed when Penguin’s Riverhead Books subsidiary announced that Hornby’s new novel would return him to the world of those who create and devour popular music. Indeed, the setup of Juliet, Naked is almost impossibly juicy … at least from the perspective of a 21st-century music writer like me (and many of you). If you read the excerpt we posted here last week, you already know that Duncan is an obsessive fan of singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, who walked away from his middling career under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago and has since become the subject of endless conjecture about his past and present lives. As leader of the “Crowologists,” and administrator of a website devoted to picking apart every detail of the singer’s career, Duncan receives a preview copy of a new CD featuring “naked” demos from Crowe’s most acclaimed (and final) album, Juliet.

The divergent emotional responses those demos elicit from Duncan and his longtime girlfriend, Annie, lead to dueling reviews of the disc on Duncan’s website, then to their breakup – and then, soon enough, to Annie receiving an e-mail from the reclusive Tucker himself. That unexpected contact sets the three protagonists on a crash course toward a pseudo-romantic triangle of hilarious proportions…

Well, that’s what should have happened, at least. Sadly, though, after that exquisite buildup, Hornby — despite clearly having reveled in the “factual” details of Tucker’s career and the barely benign enthusiasm that keeps Duncan’s website (and psyche) afloat — seems to decide that what he really wants to be writing isn’t a music-obsessive’s comic fantasy after all. Instead, the second act of Juliet, Naked involves two lost souls attempting to figure out what they’ve been missing over a period of time they now consider wasted – Tucker ruminating over failed marriages and piss-poor parenting, Annie trying to make up for the years she spent in a dead-end relationship with a guy who never seemed to care about her as much as he did about some vanished rock star. Speaking of which, Duncan vanishes almost completely from this middle section – which is a shame, because while his shallow emotional life, compulsive rumor-mongering and atrocious analytical skills don’t reflect particularly well on those of us who pontificate about music in our bathrobes, his character is easily the most interesting of the three.

The witty pas de trois among Tucker, Annie and Duncan does arrive eventually toward the end of the novel, though it is entirely too brief. Still, Hornby redeems himself nicely in the third act, with answers to the novel’s central questions (Why did Tucker shelve his career? Will he ever attempt a comeback? Was his music any good, anyway?) that are both amusing and profound. Hornby also offers some worthy insights into the nature of artistic expression – not the least of which is a matter, given voice by Annie, that Matthew Bolin has occasionally explored here in our own little corner of cyberspace: “You know that bad people can make great art, don’t you?”

Without the tangents and occasional tedium of its middle section, Juliet, Naked could have been a classic novella about our current, internet-fueled pop-culture moment. As it is, the novel is still Hornby’s most inspired in more than a decade; now, if only he could find a way to apply that same inspiration to a greater variety of situations that aren’t so obviously near to his own heart.

I imagine I’ll return to the opening and closing chapters of Juliet, Naked frequently, the same way I return to the first section of Don DeLillo’s Underworld for its riveting portrait of the Giants-Dodgers playoff of 1951 and the “shot heard ’round the world.” Clearly, I have my own obsessions – and if they’re only pursued in certain parts of a work of fiction, I suppose I’m willing to take what I can get.

……………………………………

They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet. The simple truth of this only struck Annie when they were actually inside it: apart from the graffiti on the walls, some of which made some kind of reference to the toilet’s importance in musical history, it was dank, dark, smelly and entirely unremarkable. Americans were very good at making the most of their heritage, but there wasn’t much even they could do here.

“Have you got the camera, Annie?” said Duncan.

“Yes. But what do you want a picture of ?”

“Just, you know . . . ”

“No.”

“Well . . . the toilet.”

“What, the . . . What do you call those things?”

“The urinals. Yeah.”

“Do you want to be in it?”

“Shall I pretend to have a pee?”

“If you want.”

So Duncan stood in front of the middle of the three urinals, his hands placed convincingly in front of him, and smiled back over his shoulder at Annie.

“Got it?”

“I’m not sure the flash worked.”

“One more. Be silly to come all the way here and not get a good one.”

This time Duncan stood just inside one of the stalls, with the door open. The light was better there, for some reason. Annie took as good a picture of a man in a toilet as one could reasonably expect. When Duncan moved, she could see that this toilet, like just about every other one she’d ever seen in a rock club, was blocked.

“Come on,” said Annie. “He didn’t even want me in here.”

This was true. The guy behind the bar had initially suspected that they were looking for a place where they could shoot up, or perhaps have sex. Eventually, and hurtfully, the barman had clearly decided that they were capable of doing neither thing.

Duncan took one last look and shook his head. “If toilets could talk, eh?”

Annie was glad this one couldn’t. Duncan would have wanted to chat to it all night.

Most people are unaware of Tucker Crowe’s music, let alone some of the darker moments of his career, so the story of what may or may not have happened to him in the restroom of the Pits Club is probably worth repeating here. Crowe was in Minneapolis for a show and had turned up at the Pits to see a local band called the Napoleon Solos which he’d heard good things about. (Some Crowe completists, Duncan being one, own a copy of the local band’s one and only album, The Napoleon Solos Sing Their Songs and Play Their Guitars.) In the middle of the set, Tucker went to the toilet. Nobody knows what happened in there, but when he came out, he went straight back to his hotel and phoned his manager to cancel the rest of the tour.

The next morning he began what we must now think of as his retirement. That was in June 1986. Nothing more has been heard of him since — no new recordings, no gigs, no interviews. If you love Tucker Crowe as much as Duncan and a couple of thousand other people in the world do, that toilet has a lot to answer for. And since, as Duncan had so rightly observed, it can’t speak, Crowe fans have to speak on its behalf. Some claim that Tucker saw God, or one of His representatives, in there; others claim he had a near-death experience after an overdose. Another school of thought has it that he caught his girlfriend having sex with his bass player in there, although Annie found this theory a little fanciful. Could the sight of a woman screwing a musician in a toilet really have resulted in twenty-two years of silence? Perhaps it could. Perhaps it was just that Annie had never experienced passion that intense. Anyway. Whatever. All you need to know is that something profound and life-changing took place in the smallest room of a small club.

Annie and Duncan were in the middle of a Tucker Crowe pilgrimage. They had wandered around New York, looking at various clubs and bars that had some kind of Crowe connection, although most of these sites of historic interest were now designer clothes stores, or branches of McDonald’s. They had been to his childhood home in Bozeman, Montana, where, thrillingly, an old lady came out of her house to tell them that Tucker used to clean her husband’s old Buick when he was a kid. The Crowe family home was small and pleasant and was now owned by the manager of a small printing business, who was surprised that they had traveled all the way from England to see the outside of his house, but who didn’t ask them in. From Montana they flew to Memphis, where they visited the site of the old American Sound Studio (the studio itself having been knocked down in 1990), where Tucker, drunk and grieving, recorded Juliet, his legendary breakup album, and the one Annie liked the most. Still to come: Berkeley, California, where Juliet — in real life a former model and socialite called Julie Beatty — still lived to this day. They would stand outside her house, just as they had stood outside the printer’s house, until Duncan could think of no reason to carry on looking, or until Julie called the police, a fate that had befallen a couple of other Crowe fans that Duncan knew from the message boards.

Annie didn’t regret the trip. She’d been to the U.S. a couple of times, to San Francisco and New York, but she liked the way Tucker was taking them to places she’d otherwise never have visited. Bozeman, for example, turned out to be a beautiful little mountain town, surrounded by exotic-sounding ranges she’d never heard of: the Big Belt, the Tobacco Root, the Spanish Peaks. After staring at the small and unremarkable house, they walked into town and sipped iced tea in the sunshine outside an organic café, while in the distance the odd Spanish Peak, or possibly the top of a Tobacco Root, threatened to puncture the cold blue sky. She’d had worse mornings than that on holidays that had promised much more. It was a sort of random, pin-sticking tour of America, as far as she was concerned. She got sick of hearing about Tucker, of course, and talking about him and listening to him and attempting to understand the reasons behind every creative and personal decision he’d ever made. But she got sick of hearing about him at home, too, and she’d rather get sick of him in Montana or Tennessee than in Gooleness, the small seaside town in England where she shared a house with Duncan.

The one place that wasn’t on the itinerary was Tyrone, Pennsylvania, where Tucker was believed to live, although, as with all orthodoxies, there were heretics: two or three of the Crowe community subscribed to the theory — interesting but preposterous, according to Duncan — that he’d been living in New Zealand since the early nineties.

Tyrone hadn’t even been mentioned as a possible destination when they’d been planning the trip, and Annie thought she knew why. A couple of years ago, one of the fans went out to Tyrone, hung around, eventually located what he understood to be Tucker Crowe’s farm; he came back with a photograph of an alarmingly grizzled-looking man aiming a shotgun at him. Annie had seen the picture, many times, and she found it distressing. The man’s face was disfigured by rage and fear, as if everything he’d worked for and believed in was in the process of being destroyed by a Canon Sure Shot. Duncan wasn’t too concerned about the rape of Crowe’s privacy: the fan, Neil Ritchie, had achieved a kind of Zapruder level of fame and respect among the faithful that Annie suspected Duncan rather envied. What had perturbed him was that Tucker Crowe had called Neil Ritchie a “fucking asshole.”

Duncan couldn’t have borne that. After the visit to the restroom at the Pits, they took advice from the concierge and ate at a Thai restaurant in the Riverfront District a couple of blocks away. Minneapolis, it turned out, was on the Mississippi — who knew, apart from Americans, and just about anyone else who’d paid attention in geography lessons? — so Annie ended up ticking off something else she’d never expected to see, although here at the less romantic end it looked disappointingly like the Thames. Duncan was animated and chatty, still unable quite to believe that he’d been inside a place that had occupied so much of his imaginative energy over the years.

“Do you think it’s possible to teach a whole course on the toilet?”

“With you just sitting on it, you mean? You wouldn’t get it past Health and Safety.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Sometimes Annie wished that Duncan had a keener sense of humor — a keener sense that something might be meant humorously, anyway. She knew it was too late to hope for actual jokes.

“I meant, teach a whole course on the toilet in the Pits.”

“No.”

Duncan looked at her.

“Are you teasing me?”

“No. I’m saying that a whole course about Tucker Crowe’s twenty-year-old visit to the toilet wouldn’t be very interesting.”

“I’d include other things.”

“Other toilet visits in history?”

“No. Other career-defining moments.”

“Elvis had a good toilet moment. Pretty career defining, too.”

“Dying’s different. Too unwilled. John Smithers wrote an essay for the website about that. Creative death versus actual death. It was actually pretty interesting.”

Annie nodded enthusiastically, while at the same time hoping that Duncan wouldn’t print it off and put it in front of her when they got home.

“I promise that after this holiday I won’t be so Tuckercentric,” he said.

“That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”

“I know.”

“I’ll have got him out of my system.”

“I hope not.”

“Really?”

“What would there be left of you, if you did?”

She hadn’t meant it cruelly. She’d been with Duncan for nearly fifteen years, and Tucker Crowe had always been part of the package, like a disability. To begin with, the condition hadn’t prevented him from living a normal life: yes, he’d written a book, as yet unpublished, about Tucker, lectured on him, contributed to a radio documentary for the BBC and organized conventions, but somehow these activities had always seemed to Annie like isolated episodes, sporadic attacks.

And then the Internet came along and changed everything.

When, a little later than everyone else, Duncan discovered how it all worked, he set up a website called “Can Anybody Hear Me?”— the title of a track from an obscure EP recorded after the wounding failure of Crowe’s first album. Until then, the nearest fellow fan had lived in Manchester, sixty or seventy miles away, and Tucker met up with him once or twice a year; now the nearest fans lived in Duncan’s laptop, and there were hundreds of them, from all around the world, and Duncan spoke to them all the time. There seemed to be a surprising amount to talk about. The website had a “Latest News” section, which never failed to amuse Annie, Tucker no longer being a man who did an awful lot. (“As far as we know,” Duncan always said.) There was always something that passed for news among the faithful, though — a Crowe night on an Internet radio station, a new article, a new album from a former band member, an interview with an engineer. The bulk of the content, though, consisted of essays analyzing lyrics, or discussing influences, or conjecturing, apparently inexhaustibly, about the silence. It wasn’t as if Duncan didn’t have other interests. He had a specialist knowledge of 1970s American independent cinema and the novels of Nathanael West and he was developing a nice new line in HBO television series — he thought he might be ready to teach The Wire in the not-too-distant future. But these were all flirtations, by comparison. Tucker Crowe was his life partner. If Crowe were to die— to die in real life, as it were, rather than creatively — Duncan would lead the mourning. (He’d already written the obituary. Every now and again he’d worry out loud about whether he should show it to a reputable newspaper now, or wait until it was needed.)

If Tucker was the husband, then Annie should somehow have become the mistress, but of course that wasn’t right — the word was much too exotic and implied a level of sexual activity that would horrify them both nowadays. It would have daunted them even in the early days of their relationship. Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who’d come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years. They had both moved to the same English seaside town at around the same time, Duncan to finish his thesis and Annie to teach, and they had been introduced by mutual friends who could see that, if nothing else, they could talk about books and music, go to films, travel to London occasionally to see exhibitions and gigs. Gooleness wasn’t a sophisticated town. There was no arts cinema, there was no gay community, there wasn’t even a Waterstone’s (the nearest one was up the road in Hull), and they fell upon each other with relief.

They started drinking together in the evenings and sleeping over at weekends, until eventually the sleepovers turned into something indistinguishable from cohabitation. And they had stayed like that forever, stuck in a perpetual postgraduate world where gigs and books and films mattered more to them than they did to other people of their age.

The decision not to have children had never been made, nor had there been any discussion resulting in a postponement of the decision. It wasn’t that kind of a sleepover. Annie could imagine herself as a mother, but Duncan was nobody’s idea of a father, and anyway, neither of them would have felt comfortable applying cement to the relationship in that way. That wasn’t what they were for. And now, with an irritating predictability, she was going through what everyone had told her she would go through: she was aching for a child. Her aches were brought on by all the usual mournful-happy life events: Christmas, the pregnancy of a friend, the pregnancy of a complete stranger she saw in the street. And she wanted a child for all the usual reasons, as far as she could tell.

She wanted to feel unconditional love, rather than the faint conditional affection she could scrape together for Duncan every now and again; she wanted to be held by someone who would never question the embrace, the why or the who or the how long. There was another reason, too: she needed to know that she could have one, that there was life in her. Duncan had put her to sleep, and in her sleep she’d been desexed.

She’d get over all this, presumably; or at least one day it would become a wistful regret, rather than a sharp hunger. But this holiday hadn’t been designed to comfort her. There was an argument that you might as well change nappies as hang out in men’s lavatories taking pictures. The amount of time they had for themselves was beginning to feel sort of … decadent.

At breakfast in their cheap and nasty hotel in downtown San Francisco, Annie read the Chronicle and decided she didn’t want to see the hedge obscuring the front lawn of Julie Beatty’s house in Berkeley. There were plenty of other things to do in the Bay Area. She wanted to see Haight-Ashbury, she wanted to buy a book at City Lights, she wanted to visit Alcatraz, she wanted to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. There was an exhibition of postwar West Coast art on at the Museum of Modern Art just down the street. She was happy that Tucker had lured them out to California, but she didn’t want to spend a morning watching Julie’s neighbors decide whether they constituted a security risk.

“You’re joking,” said Duncan.

She laughed.

“No,” she said. “I really can think of better things to do.”

“When we’ve come all this way? Why have you gone like this all of a sudden? Aren’t you interested? I mean, supposing she drives out of her garage while we’re outside?”

“Then I’d feel even more stupid,” she said. “She’d look at me and think, ‘I wouldn’t expect any different from him. He’s one of the creepy guys. But what’s a woman doing there?’ ”

“You’re having me on.”

“I’m really not, Duncan. We’re in San Francisco for twenty-four hours and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Going to some woman’s house … If you had a day in London, would you spend it outside somebody’s house in, I don’t know, Gospel Oak?”

“But if you’ve actually come to see somebody’s house in Gospel Oak … And it’s not just some woman’s house, you know that. Things happened there. I’m going to stand where he stood.”

No, it wasn’t just any house. Everybody, apart from just about everybody, knew that. Julie Beatty had been living there with her first husband, who taught at Berkeley, when she met Tucker at a party thrown by Francis Ford Coppola. She left her husband that night. Very shortly afterward, however, she thought better of it all and went home to patch things up. That was the story, anyway. Annie had never really understood how Duncan and his fellow fans could be quite so certain about tiny private tumults that took place decades ago, but they were. “You and Your Perfect Life,” the seven-minute song that ends the album, is supposed to be about the night Tucker stood outside the family home, “Throwing stones at the window / ’Til he came to the door / So where were you, Mrs. Steven Balfour?”

The husband wasn’t called Steven Balfour, needless to say, and the choice of a fictitious name had inevitably provoked endless speculation on the message boards. Duncan’s theory was that he had been named after the British prime minister, the man who was accused by Lloyd George of turning the House of Lords into “Mr. Balfour’s poodle” — Juliet, by extension, has become her husband’s poodle. This interpretation is now accepted as definitive by the Tucker community, and if you look up “You and Your Perfect Life” on Wikipedia, apparently, you’ll see Duncan’s name in the footnotes, with a link to his essay. Nobody on the website had ever dared wonder aloud whether the surname had been chosen simply because it rhymed with the word “door.”

Annie loved “You and Your Perfect Life.” She loved its relentless anger, and the way Tucker moved from autobiography to social commentary by turning the song into a rant about how smart women got obliterated by their men. She didn’t usually like howling guitar solos, but she liked the way that the howling guitar solo in “Perfect Life” seemed just as articulate and as angry as the lyrics. And she loved the irony of it all — the way that Tucker, the man wagging his finger at Steven Balfour, had obliterated Julie more completely than her husband had ever managed. She would be the woman who broke Tucker’s heart forever.

Annie felt sorry for Julie, who’d had to deal with men like Duncan throwing stones at her windows, metaphorically and probably literally, every now and again, ever since the song was released. But she envied her, too. Who wouldn’t want to make a man that passionate, that unhappy, that inspired? If you couldn’t write songs yourself, then surely what Julie had done was the next best thing?

She still didn’t want to see the house, though. After breakfast she took a cab to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and walked back toward the city, the salt wind somehow sharpening her joy in being alone. Duncan felt slightly odd, going to Juliet’s place without Annie. She tended to arrange their transport to wherever they were going, and she was the one who knew the way back to wherever they had come from. He would rather have devoted his mental energy to Julie, the person, and Juliet, the album; he was intending to listen to it straight through twice, the first time in its released form, the second time with the songs placed in the order that Tucker Crowe originally wanted them, according to the sound engineer in charge of the sessions. But that wasn’t going to work out now, because he was going to need all his concentration for the BART. As far as he could tell, he had to get on at Powell Street and take the red line up to North Berkeley. It looked easy but, of course, it wasn’t, because once he was down on the platform he couldn’t find any way of telling what was a red-line train and what wasn’t, and he couldn’t ask anyone. Asking somebody would make it look as though he wasn’t a native, and though this wouldn’t matter in Rome or Paris or even in London, it mattered here, where so many things that were important to him had happened. And because he couldn’t ask, he ended up on a yellow-line train, only he couldn’t tell it was yellow until he got to Rockridge, which meant that he had to go back to the 19th St. Oakland stop and change. What was wrong with her? He knew she wasn’t as devoted to Tucker Crowe as he was, but he’d thought that in recent years she’d started to get it, properly.

A couple of times he’d come home to find her playing “You and Your Perfect Life,” although he’d been unable to interest her in the infamous but superior Bottom Line bootleg version, when Tucker had smashed his guitar to smithereens at the end of the solo. (The sound was a little muddy, admittedly, and an annoying drunk person kept shouting “Rock ’n’ roll!” into the bootlegger’s microphone during the last verse, but if it was anger and pain she was after, then this was the one.) He’d tried to pretend that her decision not to come was perfectly understandable, but the truth was, he was hurt. Hurt and, temporarily at least, lost.

Getting to North Berkeley station felt like an achievement in itself, and he allowed himself the luxury of asking for directions to Edith Street as a reward. It was fine, not knowing the way to a residential street. Even natives couldn’t be expected to know everything. Except of course the moment he opened his mouth, the woman he picked on wanted to tell him that she’d spent a year in Kensington, London, after she’d graduated.

He hadn’t expected the streets to be quite so long and hilly, nor the houses quite so far apart, and by the time he found the right house, he was sweaty and thirsty, while at the same time bursting for a pee. There was no doubt he’d have been clearer-headed if he’d stopped somewhere near the BART station for a drink and a visit to the restroom. But he’d been thirsty and in need of a toilet before, and had always resisted the temptation to break into a stranger’s house.

When he got to 1131 Edith Street, there was a kid sitting on the pavement outside, his back against a fence that looked as though it might have been erected simply to stop him from getting any further. He was in his late teens, with long, greasy hair and a wispy goatee, and when he realized that Duncan had come to look at the house, he stood up and dusted himself off.

“Yo,” he said.

Duncan cleared his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to return the greeting, but he offered a “Hi” instead of a “Hello,” just to show that he had an informal register.

“They’re not home,” said the kid. “I think they might have gone to the East Coast. The Hamptons or some shit like that.”

“Oh. Right. Oh well.”

“You know them?”

“No, no. I just … You know, I’m a, well, a Crowologist. I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought, you know … ”

“You from England?”

Duncan nodded.

“You came all the way from England to see where Tucker Crowe threw his stones?” The kid laughed, so Duncan laughed, too.

“No, no. God no. Ha! I had some business in the city, and I thought, you know … What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Juliet is my favorite album of all time.”

Duncan nodded. The teacher in him wanted to point out the non sequitur; the fan understood completely. How could he not? He didn’t get the sidewalk-sitting, though.

Duncan’s plan had been to look, imagine the trajectory of the stones, maybe take a picture and then leave. The boy, however, seemed to regard the house as if it were a place of spiritual significance, capable of promoting a profound inner peace.

“I’ve been here, like, six or seven times?” the boy said. “Always blows me away.”

“I know what you mean,” said Duncan, although he didn’t. Perhaps it was his age, or his Englishness, but he wasn’t being blown away, and he hadn’t expected to be, either. It was, after all, a pleasant detached house they were standing outside, not the Taj Mahal. In any case, the need to pee was preventing any real appreciation of the moment.

“You wouldn’t happen to know . . . What’s your name?”

“Elliott.”

“I’m Duncan.”

“Hi, Duncan.”

“Elliott, you wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a Starbucks near here? Or something? I need a restroom.”

“Ha!” said the kid.

Duncan stared at him. What kind of answer was that?

“See, I do know one right near here. But I kind of promised myself I wouldn’t use it again.”

“Right,” said Duncan. “But … Would it matter if I did?”

“Kind of. Because I’d still be breaking the promise.”

“Oh. Well, as I don’t really understand what kind of promise you can make with regard to a public lavatory, I’m not sure I can help you with your ethical dilemma.”

The boy laughed. “I love the way you English talk. ‘Ethical dilemma.’ That’s great.”

Duncan didn’t disabuse him, although he did wonder how many of his students back home would even have been able to repeat the phrase accurately, let alone use it themselves.

“But you don’t think you can help me.”

“Oh. Well. Maybe. How about if I told you how to find it but I didn’t come with you?”

“I wasn’t really expecting you to come with me, to be honest.”

“No. Right. I should explain. The nearest toilet to here is in there.” Elliott pointed down the driveway toward Juliet’s house.

“Yes, well, I suppose it would be,” said Duncan. “But that doesn’t really help me.”

“Except I know where they keep their spare key.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. I’ve been inside like three times? Once to use the shower. A couple times just to see what I could see. I never steal anything big. Just, you know, paperweights and shit. Souvenirs.”

Duncan examined the boy’s face for evidence of an elaborate joke, a satirical dig at Crowologists, and decided that Elliott hadn’t made a joke since he’d turned seventeen.

“You let yourself into their house when they’re out?”

The boy shrugged. “Yeah. I feel bad about it, which is why I wasn’t sure about telling you.”

Duncan suddenly noticed that on the ground there was a chalk drawing of a pair of feet, and an arrowed line pointing toward the house. Tucker’s feet, presumably, and Tucker’s stones. He wished he hadn’t seen the drawing. It gave him less to do.

“Well, I can’t do that.”

“No. Sure. I understand.”

“So there’s nothing else?”

Edith Street was long and leafy, and the next cross street was long and leafy, too. It was the sort of American suburb where residents had to get into their cars to buy a pint of milk.

“Not for a mile or two.”

Duncan puffed out his cheeks, a gesture, he realized even as he was making it, intended to prepare the way for the decision he’d already made. He could have gone behind a hedge; he could have left that second, walked back to the BART station and found a café, walked back again if he needed to. Which he didn’t, really, because he’d seen all there was to see. That was the root of the problem. If more had been . . . laid on for people like him, he wouldn’t have had to create his own excitement. It wouldn’t have killed her to mark the significance of the place in some way, would it? With a discreet plaque or something? He hadn’t been prepared for the mundanity of Juliet’s house, just as he hadn’t really been prepared for the malodorous functionality of the men’s room in Minneapolis.

“A mile or two? I’m not sure I can wait that long.”

“Up to you.”

“Where’s the key?”

“There’s a loose brick in the porch there. Low down.”

“And you’re sure the key’s still there? When did you last look?”

“Honestly? I went in just before you came. I didn’t take a single thing. But I can never believe that I’m standing in Juliet’s house, you know? Fucking Juliet, man!”

Duncan knew that he and Elliott weren’t the same. Elliott had surely never written about Crowe — or, if he had, the work would almost certainly have been unpublishable. Duncan also doubted whether Elliott had the emotional maturity to appreciate the breathtaking accomplishment of Juliet (which, as far as Duncan was concerned, was a darker, deeper, more fully realized collection of songs than the overrated Blood on the Tracks), and nor would he have been able to cite its influences: Dylan and Leonard Cohen, of course, but also Dylan Thomas, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Shelley, the Book of Job, Camus, Pinter, Beckett and early Dolly Parton. But people who didn’t understand all this might look at them and decide, erroneously, that they were similar in some way. Both of them had the same need to stand in fucking Juliet’s house, for example. Duncan followed Elliott down the short driveway to the house and watched as the boy groped for the key and opened the door.

The house was dark — all the blinds were down — and smelled of incense, or maybe some kind of exotic potpourri. Duncan couldn’t have lived with it, but presumably Julie Beatty and her family weren’t sick with nerves all the time when they were in residence, the way Duncan was feeling now. The smell sharpened his fear and made him wonder whether he might throw up.

He’d made an enormous mistake, but there was no undoing it. He was inside, so even if he didn’t use the toilet, he’d still committed the crime. Idiot. And idiot boy, too, for persuading him that this was a good idea.

“So there’s a small toilet down here, and it’s got some cool stuff on the walls. Cartoons and shit. But the bathroom upstairs, you see her makeup and towels and everything. It’s spooky. I mean, not spooky to her, probably. But spooky if you only kind of half believe she even existed.”

Duncan understood the appeal of seeing Julie Beatty’s makeup absolutely, and his understanding added to his sense of self-loathing.

“Yes, well, I haven’t got time to mess around,” said Duncan, hoping that Elliott wouldn’t point out the obvious holes in the assertion. “Just point me toward the downstairs one.”

They were in a large hallway with several doors leading off it. Elliott nodded at one of them, and Duncan marched toward it briskly, an Englishman with pressing West Coast business appointments who’d traveled some time out of his hectic schedule to stand on a sidewalk, and then break into someone’s house for the hell of it.

He made the pee as splashy as possible, just to prove to Elliott that the need was genuine. He was disappointed by the promised artwork, however. There were a couple of cartoons, one of Julie and one of a middle-aged man who still looked something like the old photos Duncan had seen of her husband, but they looked like they’d been done by one of those artists who hang out at tourist traps, and in any case they were both post-Tucker, which meant that they could have been pictures of any American middle-class couple. He was washing his hands in the tiny sink when Elliott shouted through the door, “Oh, and there’s the drawing. That’s still up in their dining room.”

“What drawing?”

“The drawing that Tucker did of her, back in the day.”

Duncan opened the door and stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“You know Tucker’s an artist, right?”

“No.” And then, because this made him sound like an amateur, “Well, yes. Of course. But I didn’t know … ” He didn’t know what he didn’t know, but Elliott didn’t notice.

“Yeah,” said Elliott. “In here.”

The dining room was at the back of the house, with French windows leading out onto a terrace, presumably, or a lawn — there were curtains drawn over them. The drawing was hung over the fireplace, and it was big, maybe four feet by three, a head-and-shoulders portrait of Julie in profile, half squinting through her cigarette smoke at something in the middle distance. She looked, in fact, as if she were studying another work of art. It was a beautiful portrait, reverential and romantic, but not idealized — it was too sad, for a start. It somehow seemed to suggest the impending end of his relationship with the sitter, although of course Duncan might have been imagining that. He might have been imagining the meaning, he might have been imagining the power and charm. Indeed, he could have been imagining the drawing itself.

Duncan moved in closer. There was a signature in the bottom left-hand corner, and that was thrilling enough to require separate examination and contemplation. In a quarter of a century of fandom, he’d never seen Tucker’s handwriting. And while he was staring at the signature, he realized something else: that for the first time since 1986 he hadn’t been able to respond to a piece of work by Crowe. So he stopped looking at the signature and stepped back to look at the picture again.

“You should really see it in the daylight,” said Elliott.

He drew back the curtains on the French windows, and almost immediately they found themselves staring at a gardener mowing the lawn. He saw them and started shouting and gesticulating, and before Duncan knew it, he was out the front door and halfway up the road, running and sweating, his legs shaking with nerves, his heart pounding so hard he thought he might not make it to the end of the street and possible safety.

It wasn’t until the doors on the BART closed behind him that he felt safe. He’d lost Elliott almost immediately—he’d run out of that house as fast as he could, but the boy was faster, and almost immediately out of sight. And he never wanted to see him again anyway. It had been pretty much all his fault, there was no doubt about that; he’d provided both the temptation and the means to break in. Duncan had been stupid, yes, but his powers of reasoning had been scrambled by his bladder, and … Elliott had corrupted him, was the truth of it. Scholars like him were always going to be vulnerable to the excesses of obsessives, because, yes, they shared a tiny strand of the same DNA. His heart rate began to slow. He was calming himself down with the familiar stories he always told himself when doubt crept in.

When the train stopped at the next station, however, a Latino who looked a little like the gardener in the back garden got into Duncan’s car, and his stomach shot toward his knees while his heart leaped halfway up his windpipe, and no amount of self-justification could help him put his internal organs back where they belonged.

What really frightened him was how spectacularly his transgression had paid off. All these years he’d done nothing more than read and listen and think, and though he’d been stimulated by these activities, what had he uncovered, really? And yet by behaving like a teenage hooligan with a screw loose, he had made a major breakthrough. He was the only Crowologist in the world (Elliott was nobody’s idea of a Crowologist) who knew about that picture, and he could never tell anyone about it, unless he wished to own up to being mentally unbalanced. Every other year spent on his chosen subject had been barren compared to the last couple of hours. But that couldn’t be the way forward, surely? He didn’t want to be the kind of man who plunged his arms into trash cans in the hope of finding a letter, or a piece of bacon rind that Crowe might have chewed. By the time he got back to the hotel, he had convinced himself he was finished with Tucker Crowe.

………………………………..

JULIET
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Juliet, released in April 1986, is singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe’s sixth and (at the time of writing) last studio album. Crowe went into retirement later that year and has made no music of any kind since. At the time it received ecstatic reviews, although like the rest of Crowe’s work it sold only moderately, reaching number 29 on the Billboard charts. Since then, however, it has been widely recognized by critics as a classic breakup album to rank with Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love. Juliet tells the story of Crowe’s relationship with Julie Beatty, a noted beauty and L.A. scenester of the early eighties, from its beginnings (“And You Are?”) to its bitter conclusion (“You and Your Perfect Life”), when Beatty returned to her husband, Michael Posey. The second side of the album is regarded as one of the most tortured sequences of songs in popular music.

NOTES
Various musicians who played on the album have talked about Crowe’s fragile state of mind during the recording of the album. Scotty Phillips has described how Crowe came at him with an oxyacetylene torch before the guitarist’s incendiary solo on “You and Your Perfect Life.”

In one of his last interviews, Crowe expressed surprise at the enthusiasm for the record. “Yeah, people keep telling me they love it. But I don’t really understand them. To me, it’s the sound of someone having his fingernails pulled out. Who wants to listen to that?”

Julie Beatty claimed in a 1992 interview that she no longer owned a copy of Juliet. “I don’t need that in my life. If I want someone yelling at me for forty-five minutes, I’ll call my mother.”

Various musicians, including the late Jeff Buckley, Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of REM, and Chris Martin of Coldplay, have talked about the influence of Juliet on their careers. Buck’s side project The Minus Five and Coldplay both recorded songs for the tribute album released in 2002, Wherefore Art Thou?.

TRACK LISTING
Side 1:
1) And You Are?
2) Adultery
3) We’re in Trouble
4) In Too Deep
5) Who Do You Love?

Side 2:
1) Dirty Dishes
2) The Better Man
3) The Twentieth Call of the Day
4) Blood Ties
5) You and Your Perfect Life

The debut novel (or novella, as somewhat grumpily conceded in the Author’s Note) from AlertNerd’s Matt Springer, Unconventional is, according to the front cover’s helpful summary, “a tale of sex, booze, and geeks”…pretty much in that order. And as unappealing as a book filled with drunk, naked nerds might seem, Springer makes it work, thanks to his effortlessly conversational writing and a plot that actually has less to do with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings than it lets on.

The story follows a sci-fi-loving trio of longtime friends (Marty, Ron, and Ham — a nickname, short for Hammerhead, as in the minor Star Wars character) on their adventures through one weekend at the UnConvention, “Chicagoland’s number one sci-fi con,” working in plenty of basement-dwelling misfits in Jedi costumes while building toward a few life-changing decisions for the main characters. It’s a framework you’re probably overly familiar with — as you’ll be with Unconventional’s habit of flashing back and forth between past and present in order to give the reader additional context — and pop metaculture has been drowning in geek heroes for years. At a fundamental level, the book is utterly ordinary, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does — but unlike most writers who dabble in geekdom, Springer actually has something to say, and instead of just presenting his characters as empty vessels for Klingon jokes, he uses them to deliver some trenchant, poignant messages about making the awkward transition into adulthood, and the nature of fandom in general.

Admittedly, Unconventional can be a little uneven, especially for a 133-page book. For one thing, although I’ve never personally been to a fan convention, I suspect the women who attend these things are generally not as hot and horny as the ones Springer describes — and along those same lines, I doubt many male congoers look like a young Harrison Ford, as Ron is described. After opening with one of the greatest first sentences in the history of fiction (”Luke Skywalker was just about to take a tumble into Jabba the Hutt’s Rancor pit when Theo got kicked in the balls”), the story stumbles a few times out of the gate, occasionally feeling like a fantasy about fantasy lovers — but like the Star Wars trilogy, Unconventional really comes into its own during the second act, laying the groundwork for a series of surprisingly sharp, well-written passages that manage to feel utterly believable in spite of their eloquence. Given that most of the book’s dialogue comes from the mouths of characters who wouldn’t think twice about spending premium prices for a mint condition action figure, that’s a pretty nimble feat. For instance, here’s a bit of back-and-forth between Ham and a girl who pipes up after hearing him rant about The Phantom Menace:

“I just think it’s a little bit sad for people to argue about what should happen with something they have no real control over,” she said. Ham’s face turned burning red at lightning speed and he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising slightly. “I mean, if you don’t like it, why do you keep doing it? How many times have you seen The Phantom Menace, anyway?”

“That has nothing to do with it…” Ham’s voice was squeaking its way into astonishing new registers. This was bad.

“Come on,” she said, her eyes rolling behind her glasses. “How many times?”

“I saw it ten times at the theater,” Ham said. Ron glared up at him, mouthing the word “Stop…” over and over.

“Then I would say what you think doesn’t matter,” she said, standing up to leave. “George Lucas won.”

But it isn’t just the fanboy stuff Springer does so well. A number of pages later, as Ham is trying to work up the nerve to talk to a girl, he describes his nerves as “the tangle, the fire,” saying he “couldn’t machete his way through,” and plummets into dread as “the bored sitcom audience in his mind applauded dutifully as they made their big entrances.”

Matt Springer is an author who deserves to be read. But don’t take my word for it. Go pick up your own copy — either the free PDF version or the $9.97 paperback — and see for yourself. I don’t know what he’s got planned for his next book, but I’m eager to find out.

“I haven’t got much time,” Yancey tells me.

My head jerks so hard that the pencil falls out from behind my ear. “Jesus Fuck,” I splutter. “You’re fucking dying? Fuck, Yancey — ”

“Naaah,” she says. “I just haven’t got time. You know, for the book. Good thing it’s a quick read.”

She smirks. Last thing I need is Yancey giving me a hard time. But she’s a fictional character I created to act as an interlocutor for my review of Joe Pernice’s debut novel It Feels So Good When I Stop, so there’s not much I can do about it.

I start thinking about the day I finished It Feels So Good. It was a Saturday, muggy. The ceiling fan barely stirred the air. I was sprawled on the couch, and Elliott Smith was on the stereo. A bootleg. Something really obscure. Cassandra was in the kitchen, barefoot, cooking a pot of chili. She was wearing panties and a wifebeater with nothing underneath. There was a damp spot on the small of her back. She was chopping up two chipotle chilies; she liked it hot. If you know what I mean.

I closed the book and tried to imagine what Joe Pernice looked like. I’d heard of his musical projects, the Scud Mountain Boys and the Pernice Brothers, but I really only knew him from his novella Meat Is Murder. I’d liked that one, because of the way that it was about the record without actually being about the record. I wondered what his own music was like. His credentials as a listener were pretty impeccable. I set the book aside, then picked up my acoustic guitar and played a non-ironic cover of “Crazy Horses,” which reveals something fundamental about my character.

Cassandra brought me a bowl of chili and set it on the coffee table. She didn’t say anything, just smiled. Two hours previous, I’d had my tongue up her ass. The chili was chunky with beef and beans, and the white drifts of sour cream and cheddar were like the crests of waves breaking on a blood-red sea. This fucking chili was gorgeous. Pretty, even.

“Pretty fucking chilly” is also a fair description of It Feels So Good’s atmosphere. It’s set on Cape Cod, as autumn turns to winter, and it captures the bleakness of a tourist trap in the off-season, when there are no visitors to impress and the true emptiness of the place becomes oppressive. The time is the early 1990s. The unnamed narrator, after impulsively marrying his girlfriend, freaking out on his wedding night, and fleeing New York, ends up in an empty house owned by his erstwhile brother-in-law. He spends the rest of the book nominally trying to “get [his] shit in a pile” but effectively having a slow-motion breakdown, revisiting places he remembers from his childhood, reflecting on the missteps and fuck-ups that have brought him to his predicament; underemployment in a shitty college town, a half-assed musical career, periodic stabs at academia and responsibility. Mostly, though, he drifts, just letting things happen to him and hoping vainly for the best, maddeningly passive. He hasn’t even got the balls to be properly passive-aggressive; he’s Bartleby, minus the tragedy.

“You ever read this?” I call to Yancey. She’s getting dressed before we head out to the Smog show, and I’m passing the time by looking over her bookshelves. Lots of leftover college textbooks and anthologies that no human being ever read for fun. There’s a volume of Melville in my hand, one I’ve never heard of, called The Piazza Tales.

She pokes her head around the corner and squints at the book title. She shakes her head. “I liked the one with the big fish,” she says. Her hair is still wet. “It’s the queerest book ever.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Come on. Big white Dick bobbing out of the ocean, sperm everywhere, guys sharing beds. It’s a gay wet dream. And that’s a lot of seamen.” She shrugged. “What’s that one about?”

“Dunno,” I say. “It sounds like a cookbook for dyslexics.”

“And that,” says Yancey, “is how you do a fucking allusion.”

She turns away. I never know why she does shit like that. It’s because she’s a girl, I guess; and who the fuck can figure them out?

I start thinking about this time I was having sex with somebody. Yancey, maybe. Or Cassandra. It’s hard to tell. I was drinking heavily at the time, and also I seem to have become unstuck in time.

One time my band opened for Pigeonhed in this shitty little dive somewhere and afterwards Steve Fisk bought us beers and we talked about the music business. In my memory, Sweet Billy Pilgrim was on the jukebox, but that can’t be right. Wait, here’s a 2,000-word extract from my diary covering the event:

“Do you think it’s disingenuous for an author to have his characters pretend ignorance of something even as he flaunts his own knowledge of it?” Cassandra asked.

We were in the bathroom. She was shaving her legs in the tub and I was on the shitter reading the Phoenix. “Holy crap,” I said. “Foghat is touring again.”

“It bugs the shit out of me,” she said. “Like, if you’ve got a character who thinks she’s an avant-garde filmmaker, and she’s shooting with a Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. And you’re waiting for the Sadie Benning namedrop, and it never comes.”

“I have got to get tickets for this,” I said. Cassandra was still talking. About something, I don’t know.

“And this is in a book that has some kind of name-dropping on every fucking page,” she said. “That’s bullshit. That’s like, you’re lead character does giant paintings of Marilyn Monroe, and somehow Andy Warhol’s name never comes up once.”

I reached for the toilet paper. What the fuck does disingenuous mean, anyway? “You know,” I said, “I think I’m gonna blow off your birthday party that we planned, with your boss and your rich parents — the one where you were going to announce your promotion and your pregnancy. I’m just gonna go to the Foghat show with Eddie, instead.”

She leaned out of the tub and reached over between my legs. “Marry me,” she said. Girls. Who can figure them?

Yancey and I are sitting in her pickup truck, which she drives because she is a salt-of-the-earth working-class person. Prince is on the radio, singing “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” The truck is rolling down a dead-end street. Yancey lights two cigarettes at once and smokes them both down to a nub in a single drag.

“Why the fuck are we listening to Prince, anyway?” I say.

Yancey shrugs. “Guy’s a fucking recluse, right? Never leaves his studio except to tour? So the odds are good he’s not gonna come traipsing down here and give us a five-page cameo.”

Her voice is throaty and her accent is strong. She talks like a plumber. A hot, messed-up, drunk plumber.

The truck is rolling faster. The road is uneven. “Would it explain anything if he did?” I say.

She shrugs again. She’s not holding onto the wheel. “I mean, 1999 came and went, and the world didn’t end. It was kinda disappointing.”

“All that apocalyptic dread, and nothing to show for it,” I say. The truck is lurching now, and I feel sick.

“And no more excuses, either,” she laughs. “You fuck up, you fail at being a grow-up, you try being a kid again and fail at that — after a while you’re counting on the world to end. And then it doesn’t, and where are you?”

The trees are a blur. My head is pounding. “Are we still talking about the same thing?” I ask.

And then the truck stops. Doesn’t end. Stops.