How Soon Is Never?
A Novel
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
There is a light and it never goes out . . . or is there?
Welcome to the big Reagan ’80s, where ketchup is a vegetable and the Cold War looms large and chilly. If like Joe Green you were coming of age during this boom era, your main concerns include one or more of the following: a rainbow assortment of Polo shirts worn with the collar flipped up, K-Swiss tennis shoes, a new cable channel called MTV, and Top 40 radio. Stuck in the suburban haze of Long Island, New York, Joe Green knows there has got to be more to life.
However, salvation is on the way, in the form of a quiffed-up quartet from Manchester, England, who take over the airways of a local radio station. Hearing the Smiths for the first time jerks Joe awake: Morrissey’s wry and witty lyrics speak to him, and Johnny Marr’s driven guitar chords get under his skin. He destroys his Phil Collins cassettes, pomades his hair into New Wave submission, studies up on his Oscar Wilde, and falls in love. He even shows up for dinner on time. That is, until his favorite band breaks up and then breaks his heart.
Fast-forward some fifteen years. Joe Green is making a living as a rock journalist, still recovering from a wicked post-college smack addiction and slumming with youngsters who ironically “appreciate” the seminal ’80s music that once gave his life meaning. It’s too late to go home, or is it?
What if Joe Green can get the Smiths back together? What if reuniting the long-broken-up band can reverse the passage of time and bring back the magic of youth? What if it helps him win the heart of the woman he loves?
How Soon Is Never? is an acerbic, ingenious look at Reagan-era adolescence, the power of hearing a record that changes your life, and the dangers of nostalgia.
Be prepared to see a bit of yourself in Joe Green.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Jewish boy from Long Island parlays his New Wave rock music fandom into a quest for love in Spitz's sweet, winning debut, a coming-of-age novel cum quirky romantic comedy. Joe Green, Spin writer Spitz's alter ego, is a jaded, jittery and perpetually hungover music critic for Headphones magazine. He's "rocking out and getting high and living irresponsibly" in New York City all part of the job description of working for a major rock and roll magazine but he's beginning to worry he looks 40 in daylight, though he's only 30. The well-crafted first half of the novel flashes back to Green's experiences growing up as an alienated, latch-key kid on Long Island in the '70s and '80s who finds redemption in bands like the Clash, Depeche Mode, Devo and the Smiths. Spitz shifts gears when Green meets Miki, a comely co-worker who's equally frustrated with her empty, fast-lane rock and roll life. Matters improve when a new editor gives them the go-ahead for a landmark story: the two team up to try to reunite their beloved band, the Smiths. The scenes in which Miki and Green track down Morrissey and his mates work as the backdrop for the self-deprecating, would-be lovers' efforts to resist their attraction to each other. An engagingly acerbic style freshens the familiar material, and Spitz works hard not to run the Smiths conceit into the ground. The result is a first novel that skirts the usual clich s of rock tales and growing-up sagas.
