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Are there any good novels with self-styled "punks" or "punk rockers" as protagonists? I mean "punks" in the modern musical sense, as coined by Tosches and Marsh and embodied by... er, whomever you'd say it is embodied by, so I guess you can think anyone and everyone from Question Mark and Sky Saxon to Mark E. Smith and Iggy Pop, not to mention Ian MacKaye (though actually I consider Question Mark and Saxon to be a different species from Smith and Iggy, and MacKaye a different species from them). So I don't mean someone who embodies earlier meanings of "punk" (e.g., "weak guy who hurts people to prove he's strong" or "guy who gets fucked in the ass in prison"), such as Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon.* And I do mean characters who self-identify as punks or punk rockers, who therefore will call themselves or get called "punks" or "punk rockers"; so I don't mean something like Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, for which I can and do claim that Quentin Compson and Eugene Wrayburn are my ideas of punk ('cept - SPOILER - Dickens didn't quite know what to do with Wrayburn so he ended up bonking him on the head in order to cure him). Those characters obviously don't self-identify as punk.
The character doesn't have to be a musician, but does have to self-identify as in the musical or social species "punk."
I don't mean this question rhetorically with the intent of claiming "There aren't any." I don't read a lot of fiction, so there could be a vast number of novels good and bad that star a punk without my having a clue to their existence. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is "There aren't any," since whenever I do come across a "punk" in fiction, usually as a minor character in a detective story, say someone's mysterious girlfriend, the treatment is hopeless and clueless, even if the book is otherwise not bad. (But usually the book isn't otherwise not bad.)
Maybe this is just a way of asking if William Gibson is worth reading. (I read one of his books a decade ago and I basically don't remember it. I didn't adore it but I did think it was OK.)
*Though I think those earlier uses of "punk" inform later uses, and "96 Tears" and "Pushin' Too Hard" come pretty close to the earlier uses, except those songs didn't get called punk until they were a half-decade old.
The character doesn't have to be a musician, but does have to self-identify as in the musical or social species "punk."
I don't mean this question rhetorically with the intent of claiming "There aren't any." I don't read a lot of fiction, so there could be a vast number of novels good and bad that star a punk without my having a clue to their existence. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is "There aren't any," since whenever I do come across a "punk" in fiction, usually as a minor character in a detective story, say someone's mysterious girlfriend, the treatment is hopeless and clueless, even if the book is otherwise not bad. (But usually the book isn't otherwise not bad.)
Maybe this is just a way of asking if William Gibson is worth reading. (I read one of his books a decade ago and I basically don't remember it. I didn't adore it but I did think it was OK.)
*Though I think those earlier uses of "punk" inform later uses, and "96 Tears" and "Pushin' Too Hard" come pretty close to the earlier uses, except those songs didn't get called punk until they were a half-decade old.
