When That Rough God Goes Riding

Greil Marcus, who writes in a labyrinthine, showoff style, is at his best in this book (subtitled Listening to Van Morrison) when he excavates songs from the 1968 album Astral Weeks. He unpacks the lyrics, digs into the emotions, and charts the musicians' interplay. Too often, though, the work is gauzy and tentative. It is also marred by unaccountable errors, including misidentifying a song title (Linden Arden is given as "Linden Arlen") and a person (Haji Akbar, who appears on an album cover, is called Pee Wee Ellis). Marcus's dismissal of 17 years of Morrison's output, from 1980 to 1997, is also wrong, but he at least makes an interesting case.