3:AM Magazine

By Andrew Fleming.

Toby Litt, I play the drums in a band called okay, Hamish Hamilton, 2008

Toby Litt’s previous books have displayed an interest in insular groups, from Beatniks’ sixties obsessives to deadkidsongs‘ childhood gang. I play the drums in a band called okay continues to examine the dynamic of an intimate group, this time revisiting the titular Canadian rock band first encountered in 2002’s Exhibitionism. That collection pulled off the tricky accomplishment of writing convincingly about sex; Frank Zappa famously declared literature’s treatment of music to be just as problematic. Litt doesn’t make this task any easier by populating okay with the type of personalities that are a Rolling Stone cliché: the viciously amoral leader singer, the guitarist who’s a low-key alcoholic, and a drummer that converts to Buddhism. I play…, then, charts the rise and fall of a rock band, a narrative which is now almost as ingrained in our culture as the sound of rock music itself. Litt gets around the potential difficulties present here because the focus of his attention isn’t really on music at all.

Instead, Litt uses these most hackneyed tropes of rock and roll as a means to achieving a kind of detachment. Crab, the drummer and narrator, relays a great deal of sex and drug-taking with a distance that lends events a queasy flatness — this remote intensity is aided by Litt’s sparse prose. The danger, of course, is that the book could drift into superficial horror-behind-the-glamour territory, Almost Famous in lad-lit form. Litt’s targets, though, are more specific than this, and his perceptions of personal relationships more finely-honed. As in Exhibitionism, explorations of sex are at the forefront. Groupies, of course, are ubiquitous over the course of okay’s career; such encounters are always corrosive, the overriding objective primarily to “sexually punish her for being sexual.” The women themselves are largely shut out of these couplings. Instead, the main focus of Litt’s attention remains on the close interplay between Crab, who wrestles with the morality over his actions, and his frontman Syph, who gives his squalid conquests no thought at all. This relationship produces some of the book’s most arresting sequences, such as when the protagonist’s infant daughters are held by the singer for the first time: “such an unholy terror, I felt. Those hands of his, and where they’d been, and what they’d done when they got there…my daughter’s cunt.”

These conflicting layers of intimacy, even of family, within and without the band elevate the narrative beyond the familiar rock group story, a trajectory we are familiar with from a thousand VH1 retrospectives. Moreover, the protagonist is painfully self-aware of that trajectory himself, and okay’s place within it. Crab laments that he will never “dance with the machines” like Mo Tucker, and frets over what the Minutemen would think of his espresso machine. This self-awareness lifts I play… above the tropes it works within. Crab knows he is a character in the well-worn story of rock and roll, and that drummers always finish last.

[Read 3:AM’s 2003 interview with Toby Litt here.]

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andrew Fleming is a recent graduate. He lives and works in London.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, March 17th, 2008.