BIBLIOFILE
Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley
by David Browne
(HarperCollins, 384 pages, $25)

The story of father-son singer-songwriters Tim and Jeff Buckley is one of the most fascinating bookend tragedies in pop music. Jeff, who drowned in a freak accident at 30, was one of the great musical oddities of the '90s. A singer with impeccable control who leaped from shrill falsetto to bright tenor croon, he had an audacious appetite for musical mimicry. In his voice, one heard the grand sweep of pop music--from Nina Simone to Led Zeppelin. One also heard his father.

Though largely forgotten now, Tim Buckley was himself a Pop icon. His self-destructive rebelliousness read like a textbook case of '60s self-indulgence, and his music took a commercial nosedive as it became more experimental. He overdosed at 28 as, according to one rock critic, "one of the four horsemen of the '60s apocalypse," along with Morrison, Joplin and Hendrix.

Best known as a music contributor to Entertainment Weekly, David Browne has inherited that publication's writing handicaps. He documents the rise of Buckley père and fils in alternating, roughly parallel chapters. This necessitates waiting until the end to discuss Buckley senior's death, which fails to levy the full weight of how his death affected his son. His discussion of the musical daring of both is piled with uncritical judgments and exaggeration.

But Browne's gravest sin may be in his tired, pop-addled generalizations on the "evils" of the Music Machine and how it chews up innocents like the Buckleys. With this easy out, Browne fails to find the most fascinating characteristic of the Buckleys' personalities--the twin-engine crash of ambition with art. Bill Smith

Slab Rat
by Ted Heller
(Scribner, 332 pages, $13)

Cheerful Forest Heights residents, Seventh Heaven fans and those who think of planet Earth as Camp Candyland will undoubtedly recoil and weep over the sheer bitchiness contained within Slab Rat's pages. The rest of us will cackle.

Ted Heller's story of Manhattan fashion writers' machinations should convince the naive that pure evil walks among us. The characters while away their days doing what New Yorkers do best: talking, working, lying, drinking, deceiving, ladder-climbing and, occasionally, murdering each other. The main character, Zachary Post, is an articulate assistant editor at the Vanity Fair-style mag It. He entered It's sphere with a fabricated identity and, riddled with an amazing inferiority complex, is determined to protect his new prominence. Pour Gatsby and Iago into a glass, shake, and you get this nasty specimen. And while true love, good friendship and morality occasionally distract Mr. Post from his quest, he ultimately finds that manipulating the hell out of others is the true secret of success.

Slab Rat is fantastically funny. Heller bites right to the bone of pop journalism (the young author has written for many magazines and, it seems, paid close attention). The characters are witty and wry (even Post's working-class Bronx mother). The situations he describes are smart, and the comic timing is superb. Each section of dialogue contains at least one clever, albeit often cruel, quip.

For all of the killing glee Slab Rat gives readers, it will not make anyone feel even a dime's worth of happiness. The characters are both very familiar and wholly irredeemable, which is the novel's cruelest joke. Lisa Lambert

Gob's Grief
by Chris Adrian
(Broadway Books, 356 pages, $24.95)

Though marred by one of the most unfortunate titles in recent fiction and with a plot that sounds unpromising--earnest Civil War veteran invents time machine to bring back the dead--Chris Adrian's Gob's Grief is one of the most dazzling novels to appear this year.

Awash in grief and guilt over the death of his twin brother in the Civil War, Gob becomes obsessed with bringing all the war's 600,000 dead back to life. Undertaking a project that H.G. Wells might have imagined therapeutic, Gob builds a time machine in the Victorian mansion of the Urfeist, a mysterious Manhattan gentleman and patron of noble social endeavor. But soon, the troglodytic Urfeist creates friction with the sensitive Gob, reflecting the conflicting impulses in 19th-century industrialism, which often sought to philanthropically reclaim that which it had already destroyed.

Gob's machine becomes as large and unwieldy as his obsession, growing to fantastic proportions that soon consume the mansion's interior in a sprawl of arms, oversized metal gears, huge lenses and belching steam engines. Gob finds a perfect conductor for the machine in his good friend Walt Whitman. The poignant relationship Adrian creates between Gob and Whitman is one of the book's most compelling features and is as sensuous and unsentimental as a Whitman poem.

The end of the Civil War signaled the decisive triumph of Industrial Capitalism over Jefferson's Bucolic America. Using Whitman as a catalyst to resurrect those sacrificed to Industrial hegemony creates an intriguing metaphor. The reader is left to ponder the physically and spiritually wounded Gob, who, like his shattered country, may never find redemption. Steven Fidel