Rose Books
Rose Books
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Rose Books
Whereas grappling with the large ambition of Somebody Who Is not Me, the debut novel by Geoff Rickly, it is useful to look again on the debut album by Rickly’s legendary emo/post-hardcore band, Thursday. That album, Ready, got here out in 1999, when Rickly was simply 20 years previous. His inexperience confirmed: Though Ready is an electrifying file, it is overly beholden to its apparent influences (primarily Fugazi and Sunny Day Actual Property, two of the most well-liked bands of these genres). Ready additionally fails to completely showcase the staggering potential of Rickly as each a vocalist and a lyricist. It wasn’t till Thursday’s second album in 2001, Full Collapse, when all of it got here collectively. It is rightly thought-about a basic of its period, and it crystallized Rickly as — no hyperbole, simply reality — probably the most poetic, impactful and inspirational voices of his era.
Does that imply Somebody Who Is not Me is the literary equal of Ready, a debut work that exhibits extra promise than energy? Not precisely. In any case, Rickly is now in his 40s. Between Thursday and all the opposite bands he is fronted over the previous quarter-decade, he is written the equal of many books, solely in track type. In fact, a novel may be very totally different from an album, and lots of musicians have dashed themselves towards the rocks in an try to switch their lyrical capacity to prose. Because it seems, Rickly is solidly within the camp of profitable songwriters-turned-authors comparable to John Darnielle and Nick Cave. In the case of making the shift to the written phrase, he is a pure, albeit a germinal one.
Somebody Who Is not Me is a semifictional account of Rickly’s personal ups and downs as a tormented inventive, a sensual being, and a heroin addict. If that sounds lower than authentic, that is as a result of writers comparable to William Burroughs and Jim Carroll perfected this sort of e-book a long time in the past. (It takes all of three pages into Somebody earlier than Rickly really identify checks Burroughs.) That does not, nevertheless, make Rickly’s addition to the canon any much less important. A saga of innerspace, the story pingpongs throughout years and coasts as Rickly alternately tiptoes and bulldozes by means of band excursions, romantic relationships, and a chronicle of his real-life drug battles. He makes use of his personal identify for his protagonist, however he is sensible to detach a lot his narrative from exhausting actuality. Elevating his story above the bounds of believability, he injects speculative parts such because the imagined, psychedelic, anti-heroin drug known as ibogaine, which evokes science-fictional prescribed drugs of literature previous like Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-gerasone and Philip Okay. Dick’s silenizine.
Once more, there’s nothing actually new right here, aside from Rickly’s singular language and drive. His lyrics and vocals have all the time experimented with type, texture, emotion, and modes of deal with, so it is no shock that Somebody does the identical. Passages of cut-glass sharpness dissolve into flow-state streams of consciousness. He navigates “entire metropolis blocks compressing in accordion bellows”; he recounts how he “began a band and screamed into rusty microphones, leaping across the stage till my footwear crammed with blood.” Hallucinatory prose is never this vivid — nor does it often bristle with the visceral punk power that Rickly has honed all through his profession as an explosive onstage presence.
Rickly doesn’t skimp. He writes every sentence as if it could be the final he’ll ever get to pen. It is the identical punch of urgency that propels each line of his lyrics in Thursday. Most frequently that urgency works to his benefit; sometimes it hamstrings him. He would not write as if his life will depend on it — he writes as if his minutes are numbered and nothing can save him from demise. His passages of run-on computerized writing nearly all the time overstay their welcome, and at instances so do his labored metaphors. However these are beauty points; even at its most awkwardly inward, the e-book barrels alongside on the velocity of, nicely, a very nice Thursday track.
At one level within the story, a medic at a music pageant rushes onto the stage after a catharsis-chasing, self-destructive Rickly unintentionally cracks his nostril open along with his microphone. “I am not a health care provider so I would not need to rush a prognosis,” the medic tells Rickly’s bandmates. “However I would say he nearly definitely exhibits indicators of being a lead singer. It is an actual disgrace, however there’s nothing else I can do for him.” Sure, there’s additionally darkish humor in Somebody Who Is not Me, and it is one of many many dimensions that helps push the novel in a daringly totally different route from so lots of its influences. Taken alone, Rickly’s e-book is a strong and promising literary debut. Positioned within the context of his complete physique of inventive work, Somebody Who Is not Me is more likely to be the uncooked, opening salvo of a spectacular new profession.
