329pp
08/02 - 08/17
I know a girl on myspace whose "About Me" field used to list "Dislikes: the veneration of the Enlightenment, Mark Twain..." Which, though I disagree with the particular objects of her dislike, I very much identify with the sentiment, the notion of disliking the veneration of one thing or another. Surely, we all have a personal cache of things & ideas we find irksomely overrated. As for me, I dislike the veneration of the Sixties, and Beats.
This book might appear to be a contemptible exercise in Sixties-worship. It's by a friend of Bob Dylan, who married Joan Baez's sister, with whom he recorded a couple of folk albums. Its protagonist is one of those romanticized antiheroes who opts out of mainstream society in favor of jazz, hitchhiking, dope, chicks, and Eastern religion. The back cover fluff goes so far as to call this "the classic novel of the 1960s" (this despite the fact that it's set in 1958).
But even though it was Fariña's friendship with Dylan that eventually became book material, he first was college buddies with one Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. And that's the relationship I'd like to see a novel spun out of (Peter Yarrow could be written out altogether). Fariña seems to have been influenced by his friend, and what might otherwise have been a straightforward picaresque Beat novel has various seemingly Pynchonesque flourishes. Fariña's characters in particular--the gangster Giacomo Aquavitus, the drug-peddling giant Buddha--would not be out of place in a Pynchon novel.
To be fair, the Pynchon connection isn't the only way in which Been Down... transcends the clichéd Sixties narrative. Fariña's prose is great: he has an allusive, cryptic and hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness style that reminds me of a blogging friend of mine. Fariña imbues his contemporary hipster slang with almost mystic overtones; superficial notions of "cool" become profound concepts. Which might actually be precisely the kind of shallow Sixties-worship that's forgivable in a high schooler, at best.
How I Came to Read This Book: in the course of reading my last book, Warlock, I came across mention of the fact that, while at Cornell in 1958, Pynchon and Fariña started a "micro-cult" around that book. Pynchon discusses this in his introduction to Been Down..., so my purchase of this book was motivated not only by my interest in a book by Pynchon's Pal, but also in reading Pynchon's intro.
For those of you keeping score at home, the chain of associations flows thusly: NPR segment-->The Raw Shark Texts-->Warlock-->Been Down...-->postage scale-->Mrs. Palsgraf.
