Zachary Lazar’s mode of engaging the volatile 1960s is marvelously unexpected. In his new novel, he does not attempt to encompass or define or eulogize. He is rigorous in avoiding the kind of winking, hindsight-freighted knowingness of which a lesser writer might avail himself.
Instead, Lazar finds his way inside the lives of the Rolling Stones, the Charles Manson “family” and the experimental gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger, demythologizing his characters by imbuing each one with a nuanced, deeply troubled inner life. The story of the ’60s becomes — in the hands of a writer too young to have lived through that era — an intimate and finely wrought examination of a time when excitement about new ways of living often became frenzied devotion to the avatars of that newness, whether cult leaders or rock stars.
“Sway” (Little, Brown, 272 pages, $23.99) is a meditation on personal magnetism, on the drift and desperation of icons and those who move within their circles. It is less a novel than a series of vignettes, and as such it passes the crucial test of the multi-thread narrative: Each section is absorbing enough that the reader is disappointed to be yanked out of it, only to be quickly absorbed by the next. Lazar’s prose carries the day. His sentences are crafted with a subtle precision, and the emotional palette of his writing is wide and vibrant.
It is this dexterity that prevents “Sway” from seeming arbitrary as Lazar toggles between characters and leaps back and forth in time. Linking all three stories is Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician of stunning good looks who stars in an Anger film and becomes entangled in the Manson cult.
The Manson thread receives the least attention of the three, and that is for the best. We see Manson only in glimpses.
We first meet Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones in 1962, as they struggle to find their sound in a frigid London flat. Lazar is especially adept at chronicling the incremental evolution of their sound and image.
