THE MAN WHO KILLED MICK JAGGER

by David Littlejohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 10, 1977

No relation to the real-life would-be assassin who was stabbed by a Hell's Angel at Altamont, the sociopath of this fictional portrait is a white, middle-class 27-year-old who sits at a Roiling Stones concert, hating himself and everybody. Unrelieved disgust is the motif as Ronald Harrington ponders in flashback his life as a perennial outsider--too uptight for his California high school, too fat to be successful with girls, too distracted with misery to do well in graduate school. Meanwhile the reader has to put up with evocations (Dear Disgusting Diary) of Ronald's lurid inner life in pseudo-lurid prose, phrases like ""he set one row of teeth tight atop the other,"" and analyses of Mick Jagger as demonic soul-teaser. The book ends with Ronald about to leap onstage with a knife, but the events of his life--plausible though uninteresting in themselves--do not seem to point to this, or to much of anything. News stories have long been good fuel for fiction--Judith Rossner did it in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Theodore Dreiser did it way before that--but only when the author is willing to dissect the life of his times rather than merely rub up against its sensational aspects.

Pub Date: May 10, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION