Sound on Sound Book

This inventive first novel deflates the same myths of rock and roll that it glorifies in a vivid exploration of pop culture and the shattered society that emerged from the 1980s.
Hi-Fi, a third-rate New York bar band, plays another in a desultory series of low-paying gigs as Reagan's inaugural speech drones from a TV in the background. Equipment falters, band members flex their egos, and the regular crowd shifts from boredom to borderline violence. What begins as an inauspicious account of a typical evening at a nightclub soon gives way to a stupefying catalog of trivia about Hi-Fi, the band with the "suburb sound and the suburb feel."
A kaleidoscopic series of narrative tracks duplicate the layered effect of the music recording process as a virtuosic "solo" by a glibly omniscient but contemptuous "author" faces off with the wildly paradoxical testimony of nine different witnesses to the band's infamous affairs. Hi-Fi's tepid beginnings on Manhattan's Lower East Side lead to a suspect rise to fame, baffling a would-be biographer as he looks back from his 1990s vantage point.
Gradually the events of the Inauguration Night performance expose varying degrees of madness, greed, violence and despair—an omen of the era to come. By turns reverently faithful to and highly parodic of both rock and roll and literary modernism, Sound on Sound investigates the cynical business of creating myths and hype, cracking the bullet-proof glass of our media-generated culture.

"Flawlessly executed. . . . funny, perceptive and dead-on the satirical mark." (Publishers Weekly 3-6-95)

"Writers like Christopher Sorrentino bring us back to the pleasures of reading. And there is a lot of intelligent material to chew on here. This book works like a hypertext; the chapters can be read in any order. So in that way it's totally contemporary while continuing to converse with Modernism." (American Book Review Dec-Jan 95-96)

"This terrific first novel by Gil's kid is structured after the recording technique of 'laying tracks.' . . . Sorrentino is contemptuous of his sources, in love with their stupid appeal, and utterly transcendent to them." (Curtis White, Exquisite Corpse)

"Living proof that literary genes can be passed from father to son." (Michael Perkins 5-1-95)

"Sorrentino has used the rock book format (and his superbly pompous 'multitrack' device) as a vehicle for a brilliant and complex novel about remembered truths and modern ennui. . . . The close of 'Foundation' has a crisp, cinematic grace, and the final 'Playback' crumbles the book's carefully wrought tension with delicious resolve." (Los Angeles Reader 4-14-95)

Publishers Weekly

In this ambitious first novel, which is structured as a multilayered recording session, the concept behind the plot is flawed, but the story is flawlessly executed. Hi-Fi is a not-yet-famous rock band playing a fateful gig at a seedy New York bar called Cheaters on the night of Ronald Reagan's first inauguration in 1981. From the safety of the '90s, hack writer and Hi-Fi aficionado Paul Marzio attempts to puzzle out the events of that evening, after which Hi-Fi rose to a possibly tainted prominence. The first iteration of ``what happened'' is given without dialogue or judicious description, as if it were the rhythm track. The conceit is nice, but the actual execution of it makes the first 25 pages of the book, which read like a screenplay synopsis, drab and uninteresting. Luckily, the section is followed by a series ``overdubs,'' which include: a list of items numbered like exhibits at a trial; a ``solo'' by our author, Paul; and the conflicting accounts of various Hi-Fi hangers-on and former girlfriends, who attended Cheaters that evening. In the final section, Marzio conducts interviews with the now-famous bandmembers, but nothing produces a clear solution to the narrative puzzle. Sorrentino gets away with a lot through sheer virtuosity. After the slow first layer, he completes the formal exercise he's set for himself with great vigor, and his writing, when he paints a scene, is funny, perceptive and dead-on the satirical mark. (May)