Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone falls somewhere between the historical and the surreal. In Womack’s novel, however, this alternate Elvis, known as “E,” turns out to be a racist sociopath, and is first introduced in the aftermath of a murder. In the near future where much of the novel is set, Presley has become revered as a god-one character has a job teaching “Comparative Elvisims at Harvard Divinity”-which leads to the desire for an easily controllable messiah. Sometimes this invocation of real musicians can be audacious: consider Jack Womack’s 1993 novel Elvissey, whose protagonists travel from a corporatist-dystopian near future to an alternate Earth to kidnap that Earth’s Elvis Presley. Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings deals in part with a 1976 shooting at the home of Bob Marley, referred to in James’s novel as “The Singer.” (“The reason I went with The Singer instead of his name was because I wanted him to be mythical,” James said in an interview with Midnight Breakfast.) Camden Joy’s novel Boy Island featured a fictionalized version of David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven, with whom the novel’s narrator goes on tour, and the aforementioned Whitehead’s Sag Harbor features a brief cameo by the 1980s hip-hop group UTFO, who help settle a dispute between the narrator and his friends concerning the lyrics of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.” Memorable novels have been written about fictional musicians, from Ben Greenman’s Please Step Back, which traces the ups and downs of a Sly Stone-like funk visionary, to Leni Zumas’s The Listeners, about a former member of a postpunk band trying to overcome her traumatic past.Ī much smaller group of writers have taken cracks at placing real musicians at the center of their novels. Fournier, and Alan Warner have contributed to the long-running 33 1/3 series of books about specific albums.

Many novelists, such as Colson Whitehead and Carola Dibbell, have worked as music critics, and the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Michael T. Music and fiction collide in a vast number of ways.

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry