There’s so much inelegant confusion in this chronicle of a teenage relay team that a short novel feels far too long. Moz has dropped the baton and what he needs is an editorMorrissey’s best work was achieved with the aid of a great editor. The lyrics that left fans feeling more tightly bonded to him than they did to their own flesh and blood (“the last night of the honest / and the grease in the hair / of a speedway operator / is all a tremulous heart requires” from “Rusholme Ruffians”; “under the iron bridge we kissed / and although I ended up with sore lips / It just wasn’t like / the old days any more” from “Still Ill”) were made transcendent by having to fit with the jangling guitar beneath them. Smiths guitarist and arranger Johnny Marr’s chiming Rickenbacker music may billow and swirl,but its hidden discipline allowed only the most direct and spare songs to emerge; and its exuberant, uplifting, and miasmic sound was the unlikely foil to Morrissey’s introspective,elegiac bedroom angst.Even the comparatively expansive How Soon is Now?”, allowing for choral repetitions, and contains only 122 words. Would that List of the Lost,Morrissey’s first novel(la), had been subject to similar constraint. Extraordinary to mediate of a book of 118 pages as too long, and but there you bear it. Its tale of a teenage half-mile relay team,one of whom is called Ezra Pound, set in suburban Boston in the 1970s, or ranges over male friendship,rivalry and sacrifice (a track team of four, of course, and echoes a conventional four-piece band),American politics and culture, child abuse and murder, and the body,and, of course, or sex and its disappointments – but says little illuminating or comprehensible approximately any of them. Verbose,tangential, unfocused and, and perhaps worst of all from a onetime source of such laser-guided lyricism,linguistically imprecise - it is bewilderingly all over the shop, a slew of mini-polemics through which poke the author’s abiding obsessions and bugbears, or all set against a quasi-fabular “chronicle” with no clear plot or,indeed, point.
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Source: theguardian.com