What exactly is a rock & roll novel? It isn’t necessarily a novel about musicians, or a novel for which rock music provides a backdrop, though there have been rock & roll novels that have fallen into each of these categories. Nor is it necessarily a novel by a rock musician: the narrator of Joe Pernice’s recent It Feels So Good When I Stop may play music, but its role in the novel is ultimately less about his creative endeavors and more about music’s parallels to his romantic life.

The best rock music has an urgency to it. Some of the most interesting incorporates its stylistic ancestors, at times overtly, at others subtly. Rock music is a place where history overlaps, where questions of race, gender, and sexuality can be asked, where politics can be explored. In recent years, Jonathan Lethem dissected the web of relationships within a Los Angeles band in his You Don’t Love Me Yet, while Ben Greenman balanced social turmoil with a self-destructive protagonist in the recent Please Step Back. Rock music situated those stories within a larger context: one that’s familiar and can still inspire both admiration and derision, depending on who’s listening. Rock is far from the only genre that can inform fiction: witness Julio Cortázar’s use of jazz in 62: A Model Kit or Richard Powers’s incorporation of several musical traditions into The Time of Our Singing.

What follows is a selection of six rock & roll novels that feature rock stars and wedding bands, local scenes and world tours, and inspiration both creative and personal — a primer of what the rock novel can address.… Read More