Sway: A Novel

all except for those who made it happen.

They go on to wealth and fame, as the song goes. Can you guess their names? Lazar knows that lowbrow fiction is not good for a reputation in academia and that highbrow is not what will bring in money, so he has written a cross-genre novel that winds up making more sense than all of the inane books these days on this band or that doing something or other in the ‘60s. Take Eric Clapton and his recent tome; nice guy and all, but just a guitar player who happened to survive by accidental means and who still makes Robert Johnson sound awful. But listen to the narrator in Sway talk about Johnson: “It was a folk ballad, minor-keyed and slow. It was more English-sounding than American … like a dirge. The words … were a monologue in the voice of the Devil. They spoke of the sway of a sly … man who in the end was just a bewildering reflection of themselves.”

At this very moment, Mick Jagger looks up from the recording session being described and, with Brian Jones and Keith Richards, continues to “sift through the variations … taking up the song in a completely different style” until it sounds right — until it sounds like a Rolling Stones song that is back-dropped, sly-stepped and brought to life by so much cultural action that the exact meaning of a given song becomes clearer than ever.

There’s more intelligence in Sway’s fiction than in any music criticism. There’s high culture literature in this low culture story. There’s more of a novel here because there is none.

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