The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice | Greil Marcus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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It’s a familiar story line–that the promise of our country has never been fulfilled; that America’s founding documents now stand, hundreds of years later, as little more than grim reminders of our failings. But Marcus’s book, a speculative examination of prophecy in the work of several American artists, is also a promise unfulfilled. Marcus is a widely respected American rock critic.
His signature critical technique is to draw parallels between disparate ideas or movements, and he clearly delights more in connecting points than in making them.
The rest of the book is not quite as maddening as the beginning, especially if you’re willing to suspend disbelief enough to play along when Marcus uses people and their art as blackboards on which to scribble theories. His reading of David Lynch is convivial and comfortable, and it’s a pleasure to see him place Lost Highway and Twin Peaks in a grander body of work that calls America out on the true perversity and lack under its gleaming facade.
