![]() This is a novel we need, even if it's somewhat predictably moved by a ghostly patriotism that doesn't dampen rage so much as bewilder it. It recounts an alternative history where Jesse lived instead of his brother, so there was no Sun Records and thus no rock 'n' roll, just a "short-lived rock & rhythm craze" - in which the Beatles went nowhere so the bassist cut an avant-garde album (under a pseudonym four punks from Queens would never adopt for their own band) that captured "the sound of our crazy century dying to the rustle of its own flesh falling from our times like leaves from trees." The review is printed in twin columns, like the Towers, like the Presley brothers, like America. ![]() ![]() ![]() The plot of the novel - such as it is, and please do not imagine me capable of summarizing it - turns on a question Stephen Dedalus phrased in "Ulysses" this way: "But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?" Jesse Presley, the shadowborn, leaps from the South Tower in 2021 to land in Andy Warhol's Factory in 1966, at which point the narrative is interrupted by Jesse's 12-page review of a record no one's heard by a band called J. ![]()
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