Sway
Zachary Lazar
Little, Brown
224 pages

"Re-creating the 1960s," as the jacket copy of Zachary Lazar's new novel Sway says the book does, would seem at first to be an excercise in redundancy.  It is a decade America has never really left behind.  The Rolling Stones, who grace Sway's cover in all their youthful glory, usher in the new year as the world's top-grossing concert act -- even as the amazingly lifelike corpse of Keith Richards nears the end of his own sixties.

Lazar's mode of engaging the volatile decade, though, is marvelously unexpected.  He does not attempt to encompass or define or eulogize.  He  is rigorous in avoiding the kind of winking, hindsight-freighted knowingness of which a lesser writer might avail himself.  Instead, Lazar finds his way inside the lives of the Stones, the Charles Manson 'family,' and the experimental gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger, de-mythologizing his characters by embuing each one with a nuanced, deeply troubled inner life.  The story of the sixties becomes – in the hands of a writer too young to have lived through it --  an intimate and finely wrought examination of a time when excitement about new ways of living often became frenzied devotion to the avatars of that newness, whether cult leaders or rock stars.

Sway is a mediation on personal magnetism, on the drift and desperation of icons and those who move within their circles.  It is less a novel than a series of vignettes, and as such it passes the crucial test of the multi-thread narrative: each section is absorbing enough that the reader is disappointed to be yanked out of it, only to just as quickly be re-absorbed by the next.  Lazar's prose carries the day.  His sentences are crafted with a subtle precision, and the emtional palette of his writing is wide and vibrant. He is equally capable whether conveying the constant low-key burn of the Stones' drug addled, isolated boredom in Marrakech, the psychodrama of a Manson acolyte's final moments before committing a heinous act of violence, or the quiet sadness that hangs over Anger during the months he spends providing room and board for a lover he knows is only using him.

It is this deterity that prevents Sway from seeming arbitrary as Lazar toggles between characters, and leaps back and forth in time.  Linking all three stories is Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician of stunning good looks who stars in an Anger film and becomes entangled in the Manson cult.  He is a magnet of minor magnitude: an inspiration to Anger (himself more icon-maker than icon, forever in pursuit of actors capable of playing the angels and demons who populate his films) Bobby  lacks the gravity to establish a circle of his own, and is instead drawn into Manson's.

The Manson thread receives the least attention of the three, and that is for the best.  We see Manson only in glimpses, and only from a considerable narrative distance, and thus he never truly comes into focus.  Unlike Anger and the Stones, his past goes unexplored – and the earliest chapters in the lives of the filmmaker and the rock band are some of Sway's most poignant.

We first meet Richards, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones in 1962, as they struggle to find their sound in a frigid London flat electric with ambition, competition, and a sexual tension that predates the eventual love triangle between Jones, Richards, and the beguiling Anita Pallenberg.  Lazar is especially adept at chronicling the incremental evolution of their sound and image: the way three  androgynous, painfully awkward British kids playing affected American blues begin to embody the  sexuality and dark new spirit of the times – the same spirit Anger seeks to capture in films like "Lucifer Rising" and "Invocation of My Demon Brother."   By the time myriad tragedies strike the band – drug busts, Pallenberg's abandonment of Jones for Richards, Jones' slow collapse and eventual death by drowning – our investment in these fragile, intensely human figures is profound.

Anger's life is relayed in even greater depth.  Lazar rewinds to 1928 and follows the future filmmaker from early childhood, when a friend of his grandmother's lands him a small role as The Changeling Prince in a Hollywood adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream and he begins splicing together film clips from family vacations to create abstract, dream-like films of his own.  Anger's gradual, pained sexual awakening parallels his evolution as a filmmaker, and Lazar captures his struggles and sacrifices – the tortured, self-loathing relationship of the artist to his subject, the difficulty of making work so experimental and so explicitly gay – with great clarity.  Nothing in Sway is writ large,   but by carefully mapping the terrain separating the artist from the muse and the genius from the madman, Lazar makes the atmosphere of a decade almost palpable.

Adam Mansbach's new novel, The End of the Jews, will be published on March 18 by Spiegel & Grau/Doubleday.