Back from the Dead - Hardcover

Petit, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679451277 ISBN 13: 9780679451273

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Synopsis

Youselli is a cynical, disillusioned city cop painfully aware of the downward spiral he's on. McMahon is a fading but still profligate rock star who has begun receiving letters signed in the name of a girl who died fifteen years ago, when he was at the height of his fame. McMahon is desperate to know who's writing them. Youselli is reluctant - the privileged decadence and celebrity games of McMahon's life both irritate and attract him - but he agrees to investigate.
Almost immediately Youselli is pulled into the eerie mystery of the letters - their combination of anger and yearning, their fierce sexuality, their seeming authenticity in the face of their obvious fabrication and, especially, their strange fatalism.
And though the letters are addressed to McMahon, Youselli begins to feel more and more implicated by them himself. He senses that they are somehow tainting the lives of those who read them - especially Edith Weber, the psychiatrist he has enlisted to help him understand the mind behind the letters (and who might help him understand his mind as well) - but he grows increasingly blind to the effect they are having on his own life. Finally, he too appears to be malfated: following the deadly inner logic of obsession, he becomes both detective and fate's agent, the "solution" to the puzzle of the letters leading him toward his undoing.

About this title

Review

Chris Petit gleaned considerable acclaim for The Psalm Killer, a complex, hard-edged thriller reminiscent of both Thomas Harris and Martin Cruz Smith, but absolutely individual in its achievement. And with Back from the Dead, Petit has created a haunting and atmospheric novel that's as unique as it is disturbing.

McMahon, a rock star uncomfortably conscious of being past his best, is shocked to open a letter that contains the same declarations of love as those of an obsessed fan who wrote to him years ago. But Leah, the author of those letters, is dead--so how can these new letters contain things that only the dead girl could have known? As the employment of ex-coppers for celebrity security has become a necessary fashion accessory, McMahon's wife hires Youselli, a hard-nosed city officer in need of extra money. But soon Youselli is inexorably drawn into the decadent lifestyle of his substance-abusing employers, and as he digs deeper into the strange motives of the mysterious fan, he plunges into a dark world of sexual obsession and manic love.

From the insecure musician McMahon to the down-on-his-luck Youselli, the psychology of Petit's characters are handled with a master's touch: "McMahon was making the best of appearing elegantly wasted, swigging a bottle of Jack Daniels from the neck, his eyes bulging and glittery with near obscene excitement, and looking several galaxies away. Youselli had to hand it him, he knew how to put on a party". --Barry Forshaw

From the Author

Hysteria in limousines
There’s an old film business saying, never work with animals orchildren. Maybe there should be one for authors that goes never writea rock and roll novel.

To date it is not a subject with much of aliterary cross-over, or even a particularly successful movie track record. Everyone invokes the film Performance, but who remembers Billy Fury’s I Gotta Horse (directed by Michael Winner) or Stardust, or even the grisly rock and roll remake of A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand? Or The Doors by Oliver Stone, though I have to admit a sneaking fondness for the film, which deserves the title of the funniest movie ever made by a director with absolutely no sense of humour. As for books, Jackie Collins did rock and roll entertainingly, if unmemorably, and Iain Banks had a go with a supergroup rise and fall, both of them over ten years ago. Before that, Nik Cohn — the writer responsible for Pete Townshend’s Pinball Wizard and Saturday Night Fever — produced several fictional offerings while curating his own legend as the first of the English rock-writer gunslingers. The most literary excursion to date, bar Rushdie’s recent effort, is Don DeLillo’s 1974 Great Jones Street, with a great sentence on the opening page that encapsulates the fatal attractions of the subject: "Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counsellors of lesser men would consider bad publicity — hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs."

Chapter 22 and the opening chapter of Part 2 of Back From the Dead are my efforts to write up to the level of DeLillo. The quote on how to deal with fans on page 154 can be found in a book called Common Fame, attributed to Esther Williams of all people, the Hollywood star whose movies consisted of synchronised swimming displays.

In a way, Hollywood more than rock and roll was the inspiration for Back From the Dead. For a long time the problem with rock and roll was that we knew when it was made up. Most of us grew up with it and if we read a novel featuring, say, Johnny Starr, we knew there was no Johnny Starr. The transparencies of rock and roll seemed forced when fictionalised. So I took the movie Sunset Boulevard as a starting point instead. By the time Sunset Boulevard was made Hollywood had enough of a history to incorporate a believable fictional version of itself (helped of course by starring a real life silent movie queen). I figured rock and roll had also grown large enough to accommodate fiction.

The other starting point was a book of collected fan letters published sometime in the eighties. What struck me about these letters was how tender and knowing they were, and how they acted as a real release for the writer. They were, in their way, exercises in creative writing, albeit with an edge, and the possibility of turning nasty. The twist in Back From the Dead is that the letters are apparently being written by a dead person.

When I said don’t write a novel about rock and roll what I meant is that rock and roll and narrative are in many ways incompatible. The former is spectacle and itinerary and seclusion, and the fact that very few rock stars have produced memoirs of note suggests that the subject does not translate as easily as it should and that fame is an anaesthetic. ‘We did not lead narrative lives,’ McMahon writes on page 160, echoing my own frustration of having wasted several drafts trying to make him do just that. ‘We led one of tired old songs rehashed, with squabbles over what new ones to include, of suitcases packed and unpacked, excessive air miles, identical hotel rooms, wake-up calls, altercations with desk clerks, ticket trouble, sleeping the wrong hours, irregular meals, mislaid backstage passes, bad security, too much random sex too quickly forgotten, and a lot of waiting.’

Back From the Dead was originally called Malfate. The letters in the book refer a lot to something called the malfate, which, roughly translated means everything ends in tears. The publisher didn’t like the title because it announced what was going to happen, whereas the present title is more of a teaser. I’m not so sure. Malfate is more accurate and I’ve always liked stories which announce that bad things are going to happen to these people. The narrative acts like a virus. Everyone gets infected by it and their lives change because of their exposure to the letters.

As for the music in the book, I kept that deliberately vague so that the reader can inject his or her own soundtrack of choice. The following is a list of tracks played a lot while writing Back from the Dead:

Series of Dreams, and The Boxer, Bob Dylan.

Bangkok, and Long Black Car by Alex Chiltern.

In My Room, The Walker Brothers (and The Electrician, Scott Walker).

Powderfinger, Neil Young (and by the Cowboy Junkies).

Sister Morphine, Marianne Faithfull.

See My Friends, The Kinks.

In the Days Before Rock and Roll, and Who Drove the Red Sports Car, Van Morrison.

Independence Day, Donna Summer.

Life in the Foodchain, Tonio K.

Tower of Song, Leonard Cohen.

I Walk on Gilded Splinters, Dr John.

Goodnight Irene, and There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names, Leadbelly.

From Four Until Late, and Ramblin on My Mind by Robert Johnson,

I Can’t Remember If We Said Goodbye, Emmylou Harris.

Poncho and Lefty, Townes Van Zandt.

To Love Somebody, Bonnie Tyler.

Running from Mercy, Ricky Lee Jones.

S.D.I. and Grooving, Lee Perry.

I Was Checkin’ Out While She Was Checkin’ In, Don Covay.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679451277
• ISBN 13: 9780679451273
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 257