![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Are there any good novels with self-styled "punks" as heroes?
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.
Crusher Maggot
Aha! A quick google reveals it is by Anne Fine. Here's the blurb:
(frozen comment) Re: Crusher Maggot
Re: Crusher Maggot
no subject
It's possible that when punks appear in novels the author is actually thinking of vampires but is stuck with a naturalistic setting that doesn't allow for vampires, hence chooses punks.
I've not actually read many novels featuring vampires. In fact may not have read any. I don't remember.
no subject
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2010/09/book_notes_grac.html
no subject
no subject
(Anonymous) 2010-09-27 01:32 am (UTC)(link)no subject
new franzen
"A third adult, Richard Katz, Walter’s sexy but irresponsible best friend, is the singer-guitarist of a neo-punk band called the Traumatics. He provides the x variable in Patty and Walter’s relationship."
My sister likes William Gibson and something called "steampunk," but the one Gibson I read was Neuromancer, and the characters were pretty thin. I imagine the punk female sidekick being played by Michelle Rodriguez on "Lost", with as little emotional resonance. The virtual reality stuff was well-imagined, though.
Margaret Atwood's 1972 Surfacing has an interesting portrayal of a self-styled nihilistic avant-garde filmmaker, who might have been a punk if he'd lived five years later in a different milieu. He keeps decrying "capitalist pigs" and spouting self-consciously meaningless nonsense, until we finally see his casual brutality toward his wife/girlfriend (I forget). That's the only Atwood I've read, so I'm not sure if her later sci-fi stuff gets into more Gibsonish territory or not. I'm willing to bet she's a better writer than Gibson over the long haul.
no subject
I think William Gibson is very much worth reading, but I can't think of any characters of his who self-identify as "punks". XD; In the early 80s novels and stories he was riffing off punk as an analogy for the conversation/relationship he wanted to have with the science fiction scene at the time, while titling things after Steely Dan tracks. In the later books he has a number of characters who are musicians, or ex-musicians, but the music is never the point - the point is fandom, or mediation, or the mainstream-underground dialectic. Music is just present enough to make the texture realistic; Gibson is just good enough that when it's a topic I know anything about my bones to pick with his texture are tiny and precise (but not at all equivocal).
Very very grosso modo:
80s trilogy = punk as strategy (touchpoint: '77)
90s trilogy = celebrity and mediation (touchpoint: U2)
00s trilogy = bohemianism and marketing (touchpoint: any 90s indie-ist turned cultural commentator-curator... the first that comes to mind is Momus)
no subject
no subject
no subject
There are a few cyberpunky sci fi novels but I don't know if that what you're after. I'm sure there are more but I've got insomnia and can't think.
no subject
no subject
There are a couple of fairly recent novels from Norwegian authors that have either a protagonist as a punk or the music or scene as a major part of the plot. From what I've read, these seem a bit more, eh, accurate, maybe because a couple of the authors were involved in the punk/postpunk/new wave movement themselves. Don't know if these are translated into English yet, but the best known of the ones I'm thinking of are two books by one Morten Jorgensen called The Mustard Legion and The King of Copenhagen (my translations).
no subject
no subject
stewart home is more the prankster end of things -- it's stunt-writing rather than "straught" novelwriting, but will be packed with punks
no subject
Dispatches from the YA front.
Also, I don't recall if the characters in Sarra Manning's Guitar Girl ever refer to themselves as "punk" at any point, but it's a definite possibility.
no subject
punk protagonist
(Anonymous) 2013-06-26 05:52 pm (UTC)(link)