The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of a proper career to become a publicist for a flower-pop group called the Helium Kids.
The story begins in 1964, with Nick and the band in the United States. It’s the year of the Civil Rights Act, and the Helium Kids’ entire tour is set in venues along the Mason–Dixon Line, prompting Nick to reflect on the ‘terrible, pulled-both-ways wonder of 1960s America’. He returns to the UK to find that here, too, the old world is giving way to the new: ‘There are houses going up all over the west side of Norwich. The girls stop being called Kate and Margaret and Mary and start being called Samantha and Jennifer and Suzanne.’
Rock and Roll is Life features a love interest in the form of an American heiress; the untimely death of a drug-addled keyboardist; the band’s enigmatic frontman going AWOL in Tangier; and a touching subplot involving Nick’s’s errant father.
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