Annotation: Leo Carraway, president of the Young Republican’s club, is looking forward to attending Harvard on a full scholarship until he’s unjustly accused of cheating on a test. As if his life hadn’t been turned upside down enough, Leo discovers that his biological father is actually King Maggot of the audacious punk band Purge. Life couldn’t get any worse until he suddenly realizes that although his father may be the personified opposite of all he stands for, his father is also filthy rich. Let the gold-digging begin.
Justification for Rejection: As you might guess, Born to Rock is intended to be a riotous jaunt, a story body surfing over the setting of a rock tour; something like the films Almost Famous meets The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. But it quickly loses it’s way due to a protagonist (Leo) whose perception is as narrow as a mic stand. His Republican positioning, it seems, allows him to only see punk rock as noisy garbage with no resemblance to music and he sees fit to remind us of this every ten pages or so. Since most of this book is about punk rock this becomes tedious. Although I graciously attribute this to Leo’s narrow perspective I had to repeatedly wonder if it wasn’t Korman who was out of his depth.
An aspect of writing that separates the rock stars from the posers for me is the ability to take me into another culture realistically. Due to the almost total lack of sympathy for the culture of punk rock there’s little effort to give this culture anything but the most superficial and clichéd presentation. Being of this culture, back in the day, I found myself offended by his cartoonish and flat representations of the rockers. None but King Maggot himself leave any impression on the reader at all. But worse is the constant undermining of the music which is the foundation of this culture. To each his own, but why constantly berate the subject material advertised on the cover of the book? This coupled with Leo constantly reminding us that he’s a Republican only confirms the stereotypes that Republican’s are narrow-minded and judgmental. Notably this book was published in 2006 and this Bush-era Republican never once reflects on the actual government of the time – opportunity wasted.
Similarly, nearly every situation is simply unbelievable. Although intended to create a sense of rambunctious humor and/or surprise, the lack of verisimilitude repeatedly took me out of the book. In the course of the book Leo becomes a roadie for his new found father King Maggot of the fictitious band Purge. This sets up a great opportunity to take us into the backstage world of a touring rock band. Yet instead of creating a believable space, Korman only uses the opportunity to slam dance with our suspension of disbelief. For example, in one scene the bass player strings his guitar with barbed wire. Now as rock and roll as this might look, it is totally impossible as the barbs would prevent one from threading the tuning pegs. But more importantly even if you could string a bass with barbed wire you’d be able to play exactly one chord on this rig before being rushed to the hospital. There’s a fine line between something slapstick funny and just plan silly and with details that often don’t mesh with reality, silly becomes the headliner of this show.
This is all very unfortunate as this book does get into the territory of begging such questions as, the meaning of family, identity, challenging expectations and developing a pallet for something new. Yet even these themes are much more suggested than present. Instead the dominant theme stems from Leo using his biological father to get money for college and that this is perfectly ok because he’s rich. True the plot is left open at the end as to whether Leo will continue live the life of a rock star with King Maggot or not but this dynamic shift is like so many other elements of this book: unbelievable.
Genre of Catalog: Humor, Music, Nostalgic.
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