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 report, it is overly beholden to its apparent influences (primarily Fugazi and Sunny Day Actual Property, two of the preferred bands of these genres). Ready additionally fails to totally 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 traditional 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 reveals extra promise than energy? Not precisely. In spite of everything, 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 kind. In fact, a novel may be very totally different from an album, and plenty of musicians have dashed themselves in opposition to the rocks in an try to switch their lyrical potential to prose. Because it seems, Rickly is solidly within the camp of profitable songwriters-turned-authors reminiscent of John Darnielle and Nick Cave. With regards to 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 artistic, a sensual being, and a heroin addict. If that sounds lower than authentic, that is as a result of writers reminiscent of William Burroughs and Jim Carroll perfected the sort of guide a long time in the past. (It takes all of three pages into Somebody earlier than Rickly truly title checks Burroughs.) That does not, nonetheless, 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 way of band excursions, romantic relationships, and a chronicle of his real-life drug battles. He makes use of his personal title for his protagonist, however he is smart to detach a lot his narrative from laborious 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 Ok. Dick’s silenizine.

Once more, there’s nothing actually new right here, aside from Rickly’s singular language and power. His lyrics and vocals have at all times experimented with kind, texture, emotion, and modes of handle, so it is no shock that Somebody does the identical. Passages of cut-glass sharpness dissolve into flow-state streams of consciousness. He navigates “complete metropolis blocks compressing in accordion bellows”; he recounts how he “began a band and screamed into rusty microphones, leaping across the stage till my sneakers full of blood.” Hallucinatory prose isn’t 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 relies 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 at all times overstay their welcome, and at occasions so do his labored metaphors. However these are beauty points; even at its most awkwardly inward, the guide barrels alongside on the velocity of, nicely, a extremely 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 by accident cracks his nostril open together 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 reveals 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 guide is a stable and promising literary debut. Positioned within the context of his whole physique of artistic work, Somebody Who Is not Me is prone to be the uncooked, opening salvo of a spectacular new profession.