From Lincoln to David Lynch

"The Shape of Things to Come" is still waiting for its own shape to arrive. It aims to be breathtaking in its range, but really it's just a breathtaking mess, desperately trying to unite, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. and the obscure Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu or Abraham Lincoln and "Twin Peaks." In the book's acknowledgments, rock critic Greil Marcus thanks his editor for "never losing sight of a book's argument (or finding one when the author could not)." That is indeed one talented editor.

Mr. Marcus begins with the remembrances of a few 9/11 witnesses, intermingled with thoughts on destruction from novelists and songwriters. The intent, apparently, is to establish that the terror attacks were in some sense anticipated by artists. As the book goes on, though, one senses that these few pages -- and the twisted American flag on the cover -- were tacked on after the fact to supply a disguise of timeliness.

"The Shape of Things to Come" would have been better labeled an anthology of essays, because the stitches between chapters don't hold. Mr. Marcus astutely locates in three unsettling visions -- John Winthrop's 1630 speech "A Modell of Christian Clarity," Lincoln's second inaugural address and Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at the 1963 March on Washington -- the same warning: that America must live up to the expectations of God or face a dire reckoning.

But what looks like a voyage into profundity runs aground in the shallows of pop culture. It may be true that in academe -- where Mr. Marcus, a Rolling Stone contributing editor, now labors as a professor -- classroom lectures are helpfully sweetened with pop-culture references. But the technique does not work so well here, and it is taken to an extreme.

Mr. Marcus's leap from Lincoln's sense of the divine fury behind the Civil War to the plot of David Lynch's 1990-91 TV series is especially painful -- pure bathos. As he indulges in lengthy recaps of "Twin Peaks" -- and of Mr. Lynch's strange 1997 film noir, "Lost Highway" -- it soon becomes clear that Mr. Marcus sees the prophesied betrayal of the national ideal in every crime committed by any American: both the real kind (think slavery) and the stupidly fictional.

Of Bill Pullman, the all-American actor who plays an unhinged murderer in "Lost Highway," Mr. Marcus writes: "There are moments when Pullman's face and the weight pressing on it...concentrates motives and events so suggestively that it becomes its own landscape: a window opening onto an America defined not by hope but by fear, not by reason but by paranoia, not by mastery but by sin, crime, and error. At its root it's a Puritan drama." This is the point where you realize culture-studies professors are like panhandlers on New York City subway cars: They talk because they know someone has to listen.

DETAILS

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
By Greil Marcus
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $25)

The book wouldn't have been as disappointing had Mr. Marcus either excised the historical charismatics or followed up on them with a sustained argument free of references to the likes of Bikini Kill (a feminist punk band). He might have also skipped the hyperbole ("America is a country where anyone can be killed at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all") and spared us the three pages of his students' ideas on how to cast the film version of a Philip Roth novel.

After such a paring down, a less pretentious book might have emerged, one called, say, "American Noir." Mr. Marcus does know pop culture and might as well stick to it without over-reaching. He makes (some) sense of the splintered logic of "Lost Highway," for instance. And when he departs the podium and becomes a fan, his writing unclogs: He compares a rock song's rhythm to "a car trying to start on a cold morning," while a guitarist is "one of Dr. Moreau's mistakes." But in the final pages, when Mr. Marcus calls punk "a sense of humor and a sense of doom," he unintentionally reminds the reader that this book could have used a lot more of the former and a lot less of the latter.

Mr. Smith is the author of "Love Monkey," a novel.