Thus he writes about Philip Roth, and David Lynch, and an all-girl punk band called Heavens to Betsy, leaning heavily on the insights of D. H. Lawrence throughout, the Lawrence who claimed, ‘At the bottom of the American soul was always a dark suspense.’ It’s Marcus’s usual bravura writing, which like the subjects he chooses is busy inventing itself, making itself into whatever it wishes to be. He does detailed textual analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on 28 August 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; he does long, involved plot summaries of television shows; and he does an analysis of the works of Philip Roth which manages to be both wildly hyperbolic and deadly accurate: ‘In terms of ambition the task Roth set himself might be comparable, as a plain statement of purpose, only to the totalistic remaking of America announced in November 1994 by Congressman and soon-to-be Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on the occasion of the routing of the Democ ratic majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate by a new, morally rearmed Republican army.’
Naturally, he overreaches. Describing a song by the band Pere Ubu, he dubs it ‘the Rosetta stone scribbled in crayon on a supermarket bag’. Nope. This is a book which shares absolutely the characteristics of the phenomenon it describes — ambitious, disturbing, a terrible grievance.
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