ROCK ME

This novel’s hip style, smooth tone and sensual spirit distinctively recall the music of Steely Dan, a resemblance which turns out to be more than accidental, for Marcelle Clements lives with Donald Fagen, Steely Dan’s lead singer and composer. Clements, a journalist, wrote “Rock Me” in part to evoke the lives of the musicians she first met at New York City’s High School of Music and Art and then toured with in a yearlong stint as one of Fagen’s backup singers. On this level, “Rock Me” is absorbing and believable. Casey and Michael, Clements’ protagonists, are accurate portrayals of 1960s rockers grappling with the late 1980s. Up on shrinks, down on drugs (after years of riding high) and longing for friendship though often sidetracked by lust, they speak in a delightfully spacey dialect from somewhere in between the San Fernando Valley and the New School for Social Research: “It’s just been a horrible grind for so long,” Casey tells Michael, “that now I have this, like, unbelievable negative tropism about all of it.”

Sometimes Clements’ language, with no evidence of satire, strays from the eccentric to the insipid. “You really have a great tan,” Casey tells Michael. “I hope so,” he responds. “Because that’s all I have.” Clements’ point of view is also stylistically problematic, changing from first to third person for no apparent reason. A final problem is Clements’ attempt to study a love triangle. Casey, the burnt-out lead singer in a highly successful band, leaves New York City to recuperate in Hawaii. There, she meets Michael, her former lover and band partner, and his girlfriend Leslie. Sensing the desire between Casey and Michael, Leslie, hardly monogamous herself, sanctions an affair between the two. Casey and Michael eventually make love, but rather than confronting her feelings toward Michael, Casey abruptly returns to New York, riddled with guilt over her “dirty deed.”

Clements’ portrait of Casey, nevertheless, is an intimate and credible sketch of a neurotic artist. Casey returns to New York confused, but creatively reinvigorated, concluding that she can only realize her fantasies in her music: “The best affair is the affair you don’t have . . . except in your songs.”