Books
April, 1984
Whose idea was it to invent the rock-'n'-roll novel, anyway? Just the thing to breathe life into an English-department syllabus when enrollments dip, but it hasn't done much to convince any of us that rock 'n' roll was the Spanish Civil War of the Sixties and Seventies. And that's what's wrong with Jane Smiley's Duplicate Keys (Knopf), a mystery concerned with fingering the murderer of two musicians. Smiley, not an altogether insensitive writer, witnesses death, mourning and police inquisition i...
