cover image The Night (Alone)

The Night (Alone)

Richard Meltzer. Little Brown and Company, $22.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-316-56652-0

In an alternately dazzling and tedious barrage of narrative pyrotechnics and vulgarity, rock chronicler Meltzer (L.A. Is the Capital of Kansas; The Aesthetics of Rock) recounts--in nearly 100 short chapters, through various sardonically philosophical personas--hard-won insights into music, writing, intoxication and, especially, sex en route to middle age. Evoking the sensory details of cunnilingus with painstaking precision, extolling masturbation or merely cataloguing sundry dalliances, Meltzer lays down rock- and jazz-inspired prose riffs as he draws on a rich lexicon of creative nicknames for male and female genitalia. Persnickety opinions on the legends of jazz and rock, meditations on the process of writing, elaborate wordplay and structural experimentation provide an odd counterpoint to this black-comic celebration of humanity's baser instincts: ``The twin life impulses, cunnilingus and urination, versus the twin death impulses, vaginal intercourse and writing--a neverending battle--which will win?'' Filling the shoes of Bukowski proves difficult for first-novelist Meltzer, who tends to overplay the self-congratulatory scatology and bury his flashes of brilliance--both narrative and metaphysical--beneath dicey and often tiresome attempts at comedy. (Sept.)