Newspaper Article

Carried away; The Shape of Things to Come Prophecy and the American Voice Greil Marcus Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 324 pp., $25

Rozzo, Mark

2006

Overview

In one memorable passage, [Greil Marcus], then a 30-year-old writer for Rolling Stone magazine, sometime American studies lecturer at UC Berkeley and the inspired hoaxster behind \"I Can't Get No Nookie,\" the highlight of a 1969 LP by the Masked Marauders (an alleged supergroup made up of Bob Dylan along with various Beatles and Rolling Stones), distilled the essence of Elvis in performance: \"Something entirely his ... is transformed into an energy that is ecstatic -- that is, to use the word in its old sense, illuminating.\" At its best, Marcus' work, which takes as much inspiration from Elvis as it does from Alexis de Tocqueville and 20th century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen, has always been ecstatic, channeling the drive and irreverence of rock 'n' roll into a mission to illuminate the furthest -- and often the most obscure - - reaches of American culture, from hillbilly singers to B-movie directors to the likes of Puritan leader John Winthrop, President Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The semi-forgotten figure of [Laura Palmer], the murdered homecoming queen in \"Twin Peaks,\" presides over the vast Sargasso at the center of the book. We're told that [Sheryl Lee]'s cinematic turn as Laura is \"the most bottomless female film performance of the latter days of the twentieth century,\" that when Laura says \"gobble, gobble\" (like a turkey), it's her way of saying \"sex is death\"; that, for her, \"[t]he fantasies come like fish; they could all be true.\" Elsewhere, the reader may be alarmed to encounter, without warning, an allusion to Martina McBride's Wal-Mart-country classic \"Independence Day,\" while the sudden appearance of Don Henley's \"The End of the Innocence\" -- making a reprise from Marcus' book on Bob Dylan's \"Basement Tapes,\" \"The Old, Weird America\" -- might elicit a flat-out \"ew.\" (In general, Marcus shows a lazy willingness to rehash from his earlier works.) In his introduction to a reprint of Constance Rourke's \"American Humor: A Study of the National Character\" (1931), Marcus praised Rourke for reimagining the story of America so vividly that \"you can sense her presence in whatever scene she might set.\" The same can be said of Marcus, who for three decades now has been putting his idiosyncratic imprint on the American scene. He also faulted Rourke, in her later works, for \"pressing her subject rather than being carried by it,\" a characterization that sums up Marcus in \"The Shape of Things\" all too well. He no longer seems so much carried along by his subjects as just carried away.

• Publisher: Los Angeles Times Communications LLC
• Subject: Books-titles / Marcus, Greil / Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice