SelfReliance,Used

From Library JournalBrownstein's novel might serve as the flip side of Whitman's affirmative Leaves of Grass. Set in the waning days of the Ford administration, it bursts through the U.S. Bicentennial into 'the Jimmy Carter era,' a time when America is supposed to be undergoing a spiritual renewal. Yet Jewish, thirtysomething protagonist Roy falls from grace as a hack interviewer of rock'n'roll celebrities, driven underground by New York City's growing narcissism, bankruptcy, and degradation. New York in the late Seventies is under siege, prowled by serial murders and muggers, pockmarked by unfinished construction projects. The elderly strike back by forming defensive cells in an 'Old People's War' led, according to Roy, by aging novelist Oliver Hartwell. During a brief surfacing, Roy is 'discovered' and temporarily becomes a feted performance artist. Brownstein's black comic vision of America's recent urban past is engaging from page one. For most fiction collections. Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New YorkCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.Product DescriptionThe narrator, a freelance journalist, describes his isolated life in New York's East Village during the 1970sFrom Publishers WeeklySet in Manhattan in the mid'70s, this involving novel examines the mind of a struggling writer who is either in the midst of uncovering a major conspiracy or going crazy. Narrator Roy is burntout from his work as a freelance music writer for lowpaying publications and disillusioned after the senseless death of a musician friend. He lucks into an interview with reclusive 69yearold novelist Oliver Hartwell and hopes to make enough money from it to take his artist girlfriend on a vacationbefore she loses interest in their bohemian affair. At the end of a successful interview, Hartwell leaks that he plans to stop answering his phone and his mail, and intends to vanish. He promises to contact Roy for an exclusive afterward if what he has revealed so far remains unpublished. Desperate for money, Roy tries to sell the Hartwell story to Rolling Stone but returns home to find that someone has broken into his apartment and stolen the tapes, rendering the piece unusable. Roy gives up writing, eventually becoming a performance artist (his magnum opus being the kidnapping of a lawyer's wife from Scarsdale at gunpoint). He becomes increasingly convinced that Hartwell is orchestrating everything from graffiti to news items. If Roy's paranoia sometimes grates, Brownstein ( Music from the Evening of the World ) skillfully recreates the 1970s setting, from happenings in a burgeoning SoHo to Gary Gilmore's execution and Anita Bryant's antihomosexual campaign.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.From BooklistNew York City has long served as a literary crucible, yielding fiction taut with social satire and charged with competitiveness, danger, and frenzy. Brownstein, whose intensity is reminiscent of Paul Auster and Madison Smartt Bell, recreates the sizzle and snap of the streets of Manhattan in the late 1970s when junkies ruled the Lower East Side, SoHo abruptly transformed itself from a shabby warehouse district into a realestate developer's wet dream, and the psycho killer Son of Sam preyed on young women. Brownstein's hero, Roy, is a cynical and disconsolate journalist whose activity of choice is smoking dope and staring out the window. He's poised for disaster, and when it arrives, he finds himself confronting everything from selfdestructive gay restaurateurs, an opportunistic gallery owner who wants him to turn his psychotic episodes into performance art, and a guerrilla army of street people and the elderly led by a famous author Roy once interviewed who went underground to pursue his battle against the ravages of old age and the mistreatment of seniors. Brownstein leaves us breathless with the insanity and brutality of this predatory realm and uncertain of the trustworthiness of Roy's desperate inter