I’m partway into Zachary Lazar’s Sway, a novel which imagines three 60s figures before their moments of fame (maybe fame does hit – I’m only about 100 pages in). He follows Brian Jones (and the rest of the Rolling Stones), filmmaker Kenneth Anger and Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil. As David Ulin notes in Jacket Copy, the “strangest” thing about the book “is that it involves so much history we can actually see.” He has the perfectly reasonable response of running to the internet to look that history up.
My response, tho, was exactly the opposite. I wanted the imagined history, the version that Lazar creates. He is, after all, trying to conjure the lives of these people before they became icons. I wanted to think of Mick Jagger as the ugly guy, when Brian Jones was the beautiful one. I didn’t want to go back to Helter Skelter and flip to those photos in the middle to see Bobby Beausoleil. I like the fictional criticism of Kenneth Anger’s films at least as much as I’d appreciate watching them. As when I read Libra, I wanted to let the fiction sweep over me, without figuring out what was real about Lee Harvey Oswald and what Delillo had invented.
But then I opened my latest New Yorker and there, in the listings, was a gorgeous photo of Mick Jagger and Chuck Berry backstage (from this book), captured in a moment that flies by in Sway, and I realized history had caught up with me. It’s a great photo: Mick is so skinny, so young, so close to Chuck Berry — who, with his brocade suit jacket and pompadoured hair, must have seemed like he’d stepped out of history into that moment. It’s hard to resist the visual version of Lazar’s world.
And while I’m relenting about other media, Lazar has created a soundtrack for Sway at Largehearted Boy.
