How Soon Is Never?
Marc Spitz



Read June 2008
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, White Bear Lake branch
Essay written July 25th, 2008

In the White Bear Lake library, the STs, where John Steinbeck lives, is at the end of an aisle across from the SPs. Both, the Steinbecks and the Spitzes, are on the bottom shelves. Danielle Steele occupies three or four shelves above John Steinbeck. Make of that what you want. Point is, I selected Cannery Row and for some reason turned around before standing up and the bright lime green cover of this book, Marc Spitz's How Soon Is Never? caught my eye. Then the title did. Hmm, I thought, that would perhaps be a play on the title of that Smiths song, "How Soon Is Now." Sure enough, the back cover blurb confirmed the connection. Additionally, it convinced me to take it home.

This was at the beginning of a two or three week period when I knew I would have to cram all these novels in before June 20th, the Summer Solstice, at which time I would be abstaining from fiction for the summer. So I crammed and was able to read this book in an astonishing five, or maybe it was six, days. No small feat for me, of the wandering mind and thus slow reading. I think I managed eighty pages of this book one day.

It was pretty engrossing. It didn't really "speak to me," nor could I really "relate to" it. The narrator was five or ten years ahead of me. Still, I was familiar with most of the bands he wrote about, specifically the Smiths, and that made it a lot of fun. The larger plot of growing up or developing an identity or reuniting the Smiths or whatever the plot was, was kind of secondary to me. I liked the scenery and the sounds. Rock writers should write more books. People to whom music is important, I guess that's the connection for me and this book.

The Beatles pulled me through an extraordinarily difficult few years of my life. Specifically John Lennon, although he wasn't my favorite Beatle. This was roughly the period from 1989 to 1991, long after the group had broken up but before it was cool to be into them again. I'm not going to go into too much detail about it, but suffice it to say that I know the power of music to be your only refuge.

Now, a month after the reading of How Soon Is Never?, I'm not left with a lot of imagery. It was a great book in the present tense, I enjoyed it immensely at the time, I seem to remember. But now? Oh well, they can't all be One Hundred Years Of Solitude, nor should they.

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