A s Mick Jagger sang in the 1970 song“Sway,” “It's just that demon life has got me in its sway.” In Lazar's second novel, he uses a number of real “demon lives” from the '60s—the Stones and their entourage; Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker who shot Scorpio Rising
; and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician and Manson family associate—to channel the era's dread and exhilaration. Lazar shows the decade's descent as the culture of youth (represented most clearly by the Rolling Stones as icons of swinging London) responds to assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the repression in Czechoslovakia and the shedding of naïveté about drugs. Lazar sketches out his narrative through discrete episodes: Bobby's first criminal job with Manson; Anger's filming of Scorpio Rising
; the breakup of Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones; and a series of Anger's failed film projects. Anger serves as the narrative's lynchpin, and Lazar could have easily cast him as a tawdry caricature, but to his credit, Lazar understands that, in the '60s, the marginal was central, and he brilliantly highlights the fragility of an era when “everyone under thirty has decided that they're an exception—a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star.” (Jan.)
