Rose Books

Rose Books

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Rose Books

While grappling with the large ambition of Someone Who Isn’t 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 That album, Waiting, got here out in 1999, when Rickly was simply 20 years outdated. His inexperience confirmed: Although Waiting is an electrifying document, it is overly beholden to its apparent influences (primarily Fugazi and Sunny Day Real Estate, two of the preferred bands of these genres). Waiting 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’s rightly thought-about a traditional of its period, and it crystallized Rickly as — no hyperbole, simply truth — one of the poetic, impactful and inspirational voices of his era.

Does that imply Someone Who Isn’t Me is the literary equal of Waiting, a debut work that exhibits extra promise than energy? Not precisely. After all, 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 music kind. Of course, a novel could be very totally different from an album, and lots of musicians have dashed themselves towards the rocks in an try and switch their lyrical potential to prose. As it seems, Rickly is solidly within the camp of profitable songwriters-turned-authors similar to John Darnielle and Nick Cave. When it comes to creating the shift to the written phrase, he is a pure, albeit a germinal one.

Someone Who Isn’t 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 similar to William Burroughs and Jim Carroll perfected this sort of guide many years in the past. (It takes all of three pages into Someone earlier than Rickly truly title 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 via 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 arduous actuality. Elevating his story above the bounds of believability, he injects speculative parts such because the imagined, psychedelic, anti-heroin drug referred to as ibogaine, which evokes science-fictional prescription drugs of literature previous like Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-gerasone and Philip Ok. Dick’s silenizine.

Again, there’s nothing actually new right here, apart from Rickly’s singular language and drive. His lyrics and vocals have all the time experimented with kind, texture, emotion, and modes of handle, so it is no shock that Someone does the identical. Passages of cut-glass sharpness dissolve into flow-state streams of consciousness. He navigates “whole city blocks compressing in accordion bellows”; he recounts how he “started a band and screamed into rusty microphones, jumping around the stage until my shoes filled 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 is likely to be the final he’ll ever get to pen. It’s the identical punch of urgency that propels each line of his lyrics in Thursday. Most usually that urgency works to his benefit; often it hamstrings him. He does not write as if his life will depend on it — he writes as if his minutes are numbered and nothing can save him from dying. His passages of run-on automated writing nearly all the time overstay their welcome, and at instances so do his labored metaphors. But these are beauty points; even at its most awkwardly inward, the guide barrels alongside on the velocity of, effectively, a extremely nice Thursday music.

At one level within the story, a medic at a music competition rushes onto the stage after a catharsis-chasing, self-destructive Rickly by chance cracks his nostril open together with his microphone. “I’m not a doctor so I wouldn’t want to rush a diagnosis,” the medic tells Rickly’s bandmates. “But I’d say he almost certainly shows signs of being a lead singer. It’s a real shame, but there’s nothing else I can do for him.” Yes, there’s additionally darkish humor in Someone Who Isn’t Me, and it is one of many many dimensions that helps push the novel in a daringly totally different path from so a lot of its influences. Taken alone, Rickly’s guide is a strong and promising literary debut. Placed within the context of his whole physique of inventive work, Someone Who Isn’t Me is prone to be the uncooked, opening salvo of a spectacular new profession.