The book feels like music, like an old experimental rock record, right down to its format: read “Side A” and then flip over the book to read “Side B,” which reframes the central characters in surprising ways. It’s not enough that making art can lead to destitution and poverty: now it needs to lead, quite possibly, to death? Its central characters are young people trying to make their way as musicians. A rock novel (“The Last Rock Novel,” it promises), Destroy All Monsters follows an epidemic: rock bands are being murdered on stage all throughout the country. Even though he’s stepped up to New York publishing (the Major League?), his writing has lost none of its verve, its edge. No longer with Two Dollar Radio, Jackson found a new home at a similarly adventurous publisher, FSG. Needless to say, I was eager to read his follow up, Destroy All Monsters, out last month. How many debut novels can claim that? Clearly Jackson was onto something. It came with a blurb from Don DeLillo, after all. But it also felt somewhat of the mainstream, and not in a bad way. It felt so of its moment, in terms of its literary heft: it was an experimental novel that was still friendly, beautifully written and designed, an exemplar of “indie lit” at a moment when independent presses were on the rise gloriously (its publisher, Two Dollar Radio, sort of cornered the market on this kind of adventurous literature back then). When I read Jeff Jackson’s 2013 novel Mira Corpora, it blew my mind.
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