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For the uninitiated, Richard Hell comes from the lower east side of New York City. In the 1970s he played bass and wrote songs for several legendary New York punk bands including the Neon Boys, Television, the Heartbreakers, and his own outfit called Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Hell wrote short, economic songs rife with jarring guitar breaks over which he told strange tales about love, betrayal, anger, and loss. His lyrical vision was subtle, sarcastic, and unique; therefore, it is not surprising that as readers we might hear the boldness and inventiveness of his songs once again in his first novel, Go Now.
In Go Now, Hell's blunt language unwinds the story of Billy Mud, an aging punk icon who is employed by a friend of his French girlfriend in an enigmatic assignment to cross the country in a DeSoto and write a book about the journey. The timing of this all-expense-paid adventure could not be better for Billy, and yet at the same time it could not be worse. The reader meets Billy in New York where his days are spent half-heartedly feeding a heroin addiction, rehearsing with a band, and engaging in a semi-clandestine sexual relationship with a much younger woman. With a strange sort of twisted naivete, Billy sees the chance to get out of town as a chance at a new start; a way to escape his urban torpor and his drug addiction.
Both narcissistic and self-loathing, clownishly comic and pathetically inhuman, Mud engages the reader through contradiction. Hell accomplishes a daring Quixote narrative through his banal and psychotically ambiguous Mud. As a protagonist Mud enacts a litany of screw-ups throughout his journey west. Capable of moments of profound personal insight and revelation as well as acts of profane indecency and sexual deviance, Hell's character both seduces and repels. Yet in the end Mud is Hell's greatest gift as a novelist. In the ambiguity of Mud's characterization lies the power of Hell's language. Only a writer as versatile as Hell could describe Mud's bout with heroin withdrawal with sympathy and pathos, then go on to make us despise his semi-conscious hero. Hell, like Mud, plays a great, bold game with the reader, proving himself as a writer with a vision that is not easy to shake off.
Charles Wyrick plays guitar with a band called Stella.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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