Carried away

IN the relatively short history of rock criticism, the 1975 appearance of Greil Marcus’ first book, “Mystery Train,” was an explosion as unexpected and indelible as the first records Elvis Presley had cut for Sun almost exactly 20 years before. (The title was lifted from one of Elvis’ more bracing Sun sides.) It was in the book’s long, climactic section, “Presliad,” which remains a wonder to read, that Marcus, like Elvis before him, channeled an array of influences -- everything from the forgotten music of “Harmonica” Frank Floyd to the works of Herman Melville -- into a revelatory new whole. Published just as the increasingly bloated King was lapsing into his jumpsuit-splitting twilight, it was also the book that actually made it cool to still like Elvis. The fact that one is yet able to write about Elvis Presley with an aura of seriousness is a direct result of “Mystery Train.”

In one memorable passage, Marcus, then a 30-year-old writer for Rolling Stone magazine, sometime American studies lecturer at UC Berkeley and the inspired hoaxster behind “I Can’t Get No Nookie,” the highlight of a 1969 LP by the Masked Marauders (an alleged supergroup made up of Bob Dylan along with various Beatles and Rolling Stones), distilled the essence of Elvis in performance: “Something entirely his ... is transformed into an energy that is ecstatic -- that is, to use the word in its old sense, illuminating.” At its best, Marcus’ work, which takes as much inspiration from Elvis as it does from Alexis de Tocqueville and 20th century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen, has always been ecstatic, channeling the drive and irreverence of rock ‘n’ roll into a mission to illuminate the furthest -- and often the most obscure -- reaches of American culture, from hillbilly singers to B-movie directors to the likes of Puritan leader John Winthrop, President Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Those titans of American rhetoric pop up again in “The Shape of Things to Come,” Marcus’ latest roving investigation into what makes America tick; an attempt to limn, as the book’s subtitle has it, “Prophecy and the American Voice.” The old ecstasy is still there too, although the illumination has begun to flicker and dim.

Given the opening compendium of quotes that Marcus collected in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and organized in the manner of the “Extracts: Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian” section of “Moby-Dick,” one assumes that the ensuing 300 or so pages might have something to do with the lingering aftershocks of that day. But “The Shape of Things to Come” has little to do with what America has become in the last five years and everything to do with where America was just before the planes hit the twin towers, the Pentagon and the rolling fields near Shanksville, Pa. It turns out to be, whether intentionally or not, a 1990s time capsule whose touchstones are the Clinton-era works of Philip Roth, David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” enterprises and the midlife denouement of another portly rocker, David Thomas of the long-running Cleveland underground art band Pere Ubu.

It’s the kind of oddball, contrarian grouping that Marcus has always thrived on. Yet it’s hard to shake the suspicion that what’s going on here is something of a file-cabinet-clearing exercise, as the disparate and dated elements of Marcus’ narrative are yoked under the vague and largely unexplained notion of “prophecy.” Throughout, Marcus employs the same nonmethodological methodology he’s always employed, as suggested in “Lipstick Traces” -- his 1989 study of the Sex Pistols, dada and the leftist intellectuals of the Situationist International -- in which he described history as “the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.” The approach, in other words, is intuitive, provocative, thrilling, occasionally brilliant and a bit of a cop-out.

In “The Shape of Things to Come,” the general modus operandi entails attention-numbing, blow-by-blow plot summaries -- of, say, Roth’s “American Pastoral” or the many exploits of Laura Palmer and company in the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” -- that add little to the formula that Cliffs Notes perfected generations ago and that have all the stimulating effects of chloroform. These are periodically capped off by the kind of comforting cliches that make lacrosse teams enroll en masse in American studies classes -- “America is an idea” -- or which devolve into such perplexing locutions as the following riff on actress Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer): “promises are made for the pleasure to be found in their betrayal, where it is only the betrayal of a promise that proves the promise was worth making, where innocence is killed because it is an affront to the rhythms of the nation’s story.”

The semi-forgotten figure of Laura Palmer, the murdered homecoming queen in “Twin Peaks,” presides over the vast Sargasso at the center of the book. We’re told that Lee’s cinematic turn as Laura is “the most bottomless female film performance of the latter days of the twentieth century,” that when Laura says “gobble, gobble” (like a turkey), it’s her way of saying “sex is death”; that, for her, “[t]he fantasies come like fish; they could all be true.” Elsewhere, the reader may be alarmed to encounter, without warning, an allusion to Martina McBride’s Wal-Mart-country classic “Independence Day,” while the sudden appearance of Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” -- making a reprise from Marcus’ book on Bob Dylan’s “Basement Tapes,” “The Old, Weird America” -- might elicit a flat-out “ew.” (In general, Marcus shows a lazy willingness to rehash from his earlier works.)

But if the suggestion that “Twin Peaks” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” are intricately linked or that Roth’s fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is echoing Ecclesiastes when he says, “America floods into you” (he’s not, no way) has you rummaging through the nightstand for a Tums, there are, as usual, those moments of Marcusian wonder. There’s Roth, configured as “the Tocqueville of the American heart”; the artistry of Lynch, embodying “that sense of a common memory -- a whole country, all of its history ... present in a single image”; and Pere Ubu’s Thomas, summed up as “an exemplar of the uncivilized, philosophically addled, unshutuppable American.”

Weirdly enough, Marcus is at his best here when he indulges in outright political invective, as when he cites the Nixon administration as an example of the “noir style” or lobs a reproach at President Reagan, the man who co-opted Winthrop’s “city upon a hill,” for destroying all sense of “public” in American public life. In these scattered outbursts, Marcus is once again like Elvis, back at Sun: You actually believe him.

In his introduction to a reprint of Constance Rourke’s “American Humor: A Study of the National Character” (1931), Marcus praised Rourke for reimagining the story of America so vividly that “you can sense her presence in whatever scene she might set.” The same can be said of Marcus, who for three decades now has been putting his idiosyncratic imprint on the American scene. He also faulted Rourke, in her later works, for “pressing her subject rather than being carried by it,” a characterization that sums up Marcus in “The Shape of Things” all too well. He no longer seems so much carried along by his subjects as just carried away.

But, really, the best clue as to what’s going on in this late Marcus opus -- which suggests that the author of “Mystery Train” has entered his own jumpsuit days -- comes amid a discourse on the “mumbo jumbo” that makes up Lynch’s “Fire Walk With Me”: It’s “a shaggy dog, wagging its tail like a finger.” In “The Shape of Things,” Marcus gives us his own shaggy dog story, one that barks but has lost its bite. *