Guest Review: ROCK BOTTOM by Michael Shilling

Rock Bottom
By Michael Shilling
ISBN-10: 0316031925
ISBN-13: 978-0316031929
Paperback, 400 pages
January 9, 2009
Back Bay Books
Reviewed by Susan Helene Gottfried


I liked the premise of Michael Shilling's Rock Bottom so much that I wound up with multiple copies of it, from multiple sources. After all, any book about a rock band is right up my alley, and the idea of this particular novel intrigues: take a band who's made it but now it's all crashing down around their ears.

This is where I'm supposed to say that Rock Bottom failed to live up to expectations. And while I did get bogged down for awhile right before Adam gets beat up, I can't make that expected claim. I may not have loved this book as wholeheartedly as I have loved others, but that doesn't mean this isn't a strong book, one that's resonating with me well after I've finished it. You'd better believe I'll be adding this to my recommended reading list.

As I said, the premise of Rock Bottom is fascinating: it's the last day of Blood Orphans' tour. Their last show. They've brought themselves down, they've been brought down by the media. They've had the support of their record label, and now, they've been dropped. Only, they don't know it yet.

Or, rather, they don't want to admit it. They all know it on some subconscious level. It's this hidden knowledge that the book builds on: the way these four band mates (and their manager, a woman named Joey) come to terms with this huge shift in their lives. They look back, they wonder what's ahead, they wander through this last day, almost as if they are waiting. For their final show. For real life to return. For something; it's not always clear to us -- or them -- what they wait for. The sensation of waiting permeates the book.

One of my gripes with Rock Bottom, at least in the early going, was that I had trouble telling the four guys in the band from each other, particularly Shane and Adam (although at times, Bobby, too). Darlo? Not so much. The son of a pornographer, his obsession with sex and his relationship with his dad sets him off from the others immediately. I had to keep reminding myself that we started off in Bobby's point of view; he's the one with bad eczema on his hands. Shane was the one who smelled like peanut butter. And Adam? He was the other one. The one who didn't smell like peanut butter and whose hands were fine.

It's only when Adam gets beat up in the park that he begins to emerge as a clear character. I'm sure it's no coincidence that when he emerges to the reader, he's also emerging to himself. He's finding his way more surely than the others do; at book's end, his future seems the most clear.

But back to that part about Adam finding himself at the same time he comes alive to the reader. This is a book that teeters more toward literary fiction than it does toward commercial fiction. Literary fiction isn't all navel-gazing, as many of its opponents would have you believe. It's fiction that is often allegorical. It's supposed to make you think while lulling you with its beautiful writing. Rock Bottom certainly does that. In fact, the longer it's been since I closed the back cover, the more I'm thinking.

The only time this bend toward the literary bothered me was at the end of a chapter. In mainstream commercial fiction, the rule is that you stop a chapter on a high point, so the reader doesn't want to put a book down. In literary fiction, there is some attempt at an emotional twinge, a lovely image to tide you over until you next resume reading. Rock Bottom relies too often on these images. This is, after all, a book about a band who is crashing and burning. There's sex, there's drugs, there's peanut butter, there's music. Bring it on and bring it hard… don't bring the chapters to what seems like a close.

This is purely a taste thing. Maybe it's a backlash on my part. After all, once I had my MFA firmly in hand, I walked away from academia and literary fiction. I loathed reading it and I loathed writing it even more.

That's part of the pleasant surprise of Rock Bottom. This is the sort of literary fiction that makes the genre shine, at least for me. In commercial fiction, it would be hard to pull off a novel featuring five different narrators -- although I have seen it done. Here, Shilling does it with relative ease, despite my early confusion about who is who. I can easily make a case for that being part of the author's intent: as the five players in this novel figure out who they are as individuals, they become that much clearer to the reader. We stop seeing them as a band and begin seeing them as the individuals they are. I mean, do you know which Jonas Brother is which? They're a band; they don't have to be individuals. Not until they've put in 20 years and have to emerge this way for their legions of fans. That sort of fame isn't in the future of the four members of Blood Orphans.

There is much to praise in this novel. Darlo's story in particular haunts me, days after I closed the book. The scenes with the up-and-coming band ring true -- in fact, much of this book rings true, but it's the contrast between Blood Orphans and Tennessee that screams the loudest. Who's the king and who's the loser now? these scenes seem to ask. Can you take this ride and emerge as anything but a loser?

Michael Shilling would have you believe that you can't. Yet look at the future for Adam and Bobby. They are headed off in different directions, but both of them are poised on the verge of going back up. There's potential for Darlo, Shane, and Joey the manager, too. Their future is murkier, and that suits the book. It may be sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but that doesn't mean it's all crystal clear.

Especially because the question about where the peanut butter came from is never answered. I've spent a lot of time wondering about that peanut butter, Mr. Shilling. What do you say? What's the story there?