NONFICTION
Bob Marley: The Untold Story, by Chris Salewicz, $27.50
Nesta Robert Marley: One need only speak his name to conjure up dank, dimly lit college dorm rooms where dreadlocked hippies try to sneak Thai sticks past watchful R.A.s as the offbeat guitar of “One Love” or “Buffalo Soldier” or “Get Up Stand Up” churns.
The tragically short life and singular music of this reggae superstar, however, are more than just props for rich kids playing at being Rastafarian.
“Like Barack Obama, Bob Marley is a mixed-race archetype,” writes Chris Salewicz in his biography, “Bob Marley.” “The image of Bob Marley is seen across the planet as synonymous with that of a giant, fat spliff . . . Bob’s true rebel spirit lies in his devastatingly accurate depictions of ghetto life and official oppression and corruption.”
As told by Salewicz, a former New Musical Express reporter who’s also written a biography of Clash founder Joe Strummer, Marley’s aesthetic was the unlikely product of his fatherless childhood on the unforgiving streets of Jamaica’s Trench Town; his homeland’s postcolonial violence (Marley, who tried to build bridges between Jamaica’s two warring political parties, survived an assassination attempt in 1976); and his unusual faith (Rastafarians revere Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who died in 1975, as a reincarnation of Jesus Christ).
Though cancer felled Marley in 1981 at age 36, Salewicz refuses to mourn what could have been: “He only departed this planet when he felt his vision of One World, One Love . . . was beginning in some quarters to be heard and felt.”
If the durability of this vision is suspect — and if the author’s love for his subject prevents him from calling Marley out for the egregious philandering that produced at least 10 children by numerous women — the unlikely life behind the dorm room poster is still worth reading about.
FICTION
Give + Take, by Stona Fitch, $23.99 Every decade seems to produce at least one novel perfectly in tune with its collective vibe: Think “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” for the ’70s, “Less Than Zero” for the ’80s and, maybe, “The Secret History” for the ’90s.
Stona Fitch’s charming but wildly uneven “Give + Take” wants to be that book for our hyperventilating new decade but in the end flounders on its own contradictions.
Fitch’s protagonist is Ross Clifton, an itinerant jazz pianist with a secret second life: He steals from the rich, lonely women he meets at nightclub gigs and donates the proceeds anonymously to impoverished strangers. (Ross’ guerrilla altruism gives the novel a nice populist twist, which, incidentally, Fitch puts into practice with his own publishing house, the Concord Free Press, which gives all its books away.)
Ross is forced to adjust his solitary ways, however, when he is joined on the road by his slacker nephew, Cray, and a seductive torch singer named Marianne, both of whom bring their own secrets to the eccentric menagerie.
Cray, in particular, is vividly sketched, an amoral prankster whose manic banality makes him an excellent foil for the often dour and fussy Ross. Marianne, on the other hand, is a cardboard cutout straight from the Bacall/Chandler femme fatale handbook, right down to the slinky dresses and throaty voice.
On the whole, “Give + Take” stands as an admirable attempt at an epoch-defining parable that doesn’t quite jell. In trying for a sardonic commentary on the ethical implications of social inequity, the best Ross can offer is some hazy barroom philosophy: “I’m good at turning stupid expensive things into cash really quickly. It’s a gift. And I figure I should use it. Wealth’s getting too concentrated.”
Both Cray and Marianne offer tentative rebuttals to this shopworn romanticism, but Fitch doesn’t have the patience or the cunning to follow the implications of their arguments anywhere genuinely challenging. Come to think of it, with its ambivalence and murky morality, its uncertain mix of the tentative and the sincere, “Give + Take” may be perfectly representative of our time after all.
