AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
IT FINALLY HAPPENED: Yr. ob’t corresp’nd’nt was name-dropped in a name-dropping novel.
You’ll find a passing reference to “Clark Humphrey’s Loser” at the bottom of page 97 of Mark Lindquist’s new novel Never Mind Nirvana. Right in a list of a sweet young thing’s bookshelf contents, alongside the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (who also supplies a back-cover blurb).
I wish I could tell you all to go out and share in this grand dubious achievement. But as a supporter of good writing, I can’t.
I could also say I could’ve written this book. But I wouldn’t have.
On one level, Never Mind Nirvana’s a Seattle translation of Ellis’s NYC-beautiful-people novels. Its 237 pages include references to several hundred Seattle-scene people, places, and institutions. The references are pretty much all accurate (some were fairly obviously taken from Loser). But they often feel wrong. In some passages, it feels as if the author had worked from reference material without going to the place he was writing about (a la Kafka’s Amerika).
(Yet I know Lindquist has been here; he hung out at the bars and clubs he refers to, and has pesonally known a few of the real-life music-scene people to whom he gives cameo appearances.)
Lindquist’s protagonist Pete, like Lindquist himself, has a day job as an assistant prosecuting attorney. Pete’s also a former “grunge” musician (yes, he dreaded G-word appears regularly) whose private life involves trawling the bars for pickups (he boinks three women within the first 100 pages, not counting a flashback scene involving his favorite groupie from his rocker days).
He’s also suffering from the creeping-middle-age angst that, in novels, apparently turns the most outgoing and smooth-talking people into compulsive introspective worriers.
Then there’s the main plot of the novel, the aspect that’s attracted the main part of the bad-vibes reputation it’s got among the local rock-music clique.
Lindquist has taken a real-life date rape allegation against a prominent local musician and turned it into fodder for a quasi-exploitive courtroom-procedural plot. (Could be worse; he could’ve made it a “courtroom thriller.”) Since the case is seen strictly from the prosecution’s point of view, the musician’s guilt is presumed at the start and is never seriously questioned.
The many Clinton/Lewinsky jokes peppered throughout the text might be the author’s attempt at an “understated” comparison between the talk-radio depiction of Clinton (as a selfish heel who thinks he’s got the right to do anything to anybody) and the musician-defendent.
At least Lindquist appropriates enough of the less-than-clear aspects of the original case, a complicated situation in which both parties were drunk and/or stoned and in which even the accuser’s testimony could easily leave doubts whether the encounter was sufficiently forceful or involuntary to be legally definable as rape.
(In the real case, all charges were dropped. In the novel’s version, the narrative ends at a mistrial, with the prosecutor expecting to win a conviction at the re-trial.)
A novel that was really about the Seattle music scene in the post-hype era could still be written, and it would have plenty of potential plot elements that Lindquist either ignores or breezes through.
It could be about trying to establish a rock band at a time when the business largely considers rock passe; in a town where a young middle-class adult’s increasingly expected to forgo such “slacker” pursuits in favor of 80-hour-a-week careerism.
It would be about people still deeply involved (trapped?) in their artistic milieu, not about a pushing-40 lawyer.
Perhaps a just-past-40 online columnist? Naaah, that’d never work either.
TOMORROW: Some other things we could demand as part of the big Microsoft verdict.
ELSEWHERE:
