Rating: 
Summary: tragically true
Review: After finishing this book I think that I'm a pretty horrible kid. I picked it up because I'm a spin reader, and after reading marc Spitz's interview with himself I found it wonderfully cheeky that someone would package their life up as fiction for the sake of taking fabulous exaggerations and cruel observations. Similarly, I thought the picture of the two Spitzes talking to eachother in that october '03 issue, kind of neat.
Anyway. On to my roundabout point, one of the central themes to this utterly addictive saga is the favorite subject of many a music junkie; though covered with layers of drugs and jealousy, the main conflict is the connection that one feels to their favorite band. Not a normal connection, a strange one, the kind when the songs never get old; you can't accomplish anything with their records on because you know the music too well, you find yourself thinking about every aspect of your daily life in reference to them without realizing it, You have to seriosly consider if in the event of an emergency wether you'd save you mother, or their records. (you decide on the autographed record and the mother only because neither is replaceable)
I think that because Spitz is a music junkie it allows him to write from his own "life" with less of a degree of cheek than i'd forseen; mostly with honesty and a frightneing sense of devotion. This book is something to be feared, admired, envied, and most importantly read. I would recommend it to anyone who knows an obsessive music fan, even mothers of obsessed music fans, just so they can begin to understand what exactly is running through their children's minds. This is it. This is your brain on the smiths.
However, I'm 14. I don't deserve this book. I'm too young to deserve this book. I read it for I felt that I was an old soul, but now? I wonder why I haven't found any band worth obsessing over. I'm worried that by the time they're here I'll be too old; or that they'll never come. Until then I have my guilt-trip, illegally downloaded, smiths collection. My dark rooms. My sunglasses. My woe. my teenagerdom that began tragically late. This book showed me that the smiths cannot be mine. I will try to have them, but indefinitely will fail.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly enjoyable... misgivings aside
Review: Between a lackluster beginning and a disappointing ending are a few hundred highly enjoyable pages. I enjoyed the story for what it was, and had no other higher expectation than to be entertained. Yes, I may be somewhat biased since I too felt that The Smiths played an important role in my formative years, and that I identified with many of the character's defining moments. I felt that the end came a bit abruptly and left a few unresolved issues (especially pertaining to the article). This may not be great literature, and kids won't be studying it in English class, but it certainly is a fun read.
Rating: 
Summary: Okay I give: how soon is never?
Review: Do you like Nick Hornby? You know, that guy who writes smart, funny books about shallow people and their pop culture loves("High Fidelity", "About a Boy")? If so, then you should probably try to avoid this book. Or even if you are looking for a good book.
I will not reiterate the plot more than I need to. Joe Greene is a washed up, almost thirty rock writter who has grown tired of interviewing bands that don't move him the same way his prescoius Smiths did. After he meets Miki, a fellow disenfranchised former Smiths fan, the two concoct a plot to get the band back together, thus helping them reconnect with their former selves.
Thats the basic plot in its entirity, although it doesn't really kick in until page two hundred. The first two hundred pages are devoted to when Joe was growing up, and that part is vaguely interesting, if still not enough to recomend the book.
The biggest problem with this book? Oh, I don't know. For starters, the lead charactor is an irriatatingly whining, spoiled alcoholic(a friend of mine stated that the plot revolves around Joe getting drunk, and thats pretty true), who tries really, really hard to get our sympathy, but just really annoyed me. To add to that, there are only two charactors that I even liked, those being the bassist of the Smiths(love the band, but I forgot his name, and I apoligize) and Johnny Marr, the guitarist of the band. The rest of the charators never seem real.
The reason this could be, some would argue , is because they are indeed real people. But this book is very obvoiusly based upon the life of its author Marc Spitz, a senior editor of Spin Magazine", and therefore leads you to the conclusion that all the charactors are probably real people also. When you add to the point that plot is not enough to cover the three hundred pages, this book leaves little to actaully care about.
The one thing I did like about this book, besides bits and pieces of the childhood flashback, is that it made me want to go and get more Smiths records.
I have loved bands as much as the narrator loved the Smiths, so I could feel the dissapointment of hearing that they've broken up or the ecstasy of seeing them live. But sadly, this book is too thin, with poor charactors who are equal part unsympathetic and whiny. It may have made a great hundred and eighty page novel. But as is, "How Soon is Never?" isn't worth the time or effort.
Buy a Smiths C.D.("Louder than Bombs" and "The Queen is Dead" are both excellent) and a Smiths boigraphy instead.
Rating:
Summary: Purely Honest and Highly Readable
Review: I must admit that I got this book out of a blossoming addiction to the Smiths, and once I started reading it I realized that it was much more than a rock and roll novel. Despite his angst and loneliness, Joe Green is a pure soul, recounting those old days when he heard the album that changed his life, and many of us can relate to that. It's a different album for every generation and subgroup, and each generation claims these albums as their own, angry at having them stolen by the people who hate us or the people who are far younger. I myself will become violently angry when I hear fourteen-year-olds out buying all of Nine Inch Nails' CD's and comparing their own pain next to the songs. It isn't allowed. Nine Inch Nails' is mine, and no one else can claim it, just as Gerneration Y cannot claim the Smiths. This is an honest book, so honest that I am convinced that it is almost entirely autobiographical. If it wasn't, I would call it genius. As it is, it's a great read. I highly recoment it not only to Smiths fans but to everyone else who has ever had a favorite band, the kind of music that makes you young again despite yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: coming of age in the 80s
Review: Joe, the product of a divorced home in Long Island, just wants to fit in. He thinks he's found niche when he discovers punk rock, and a group of like minded friends at his new private school, but he really finds the love of his life when he hears the Smiths. HOW SOON IS NEVER is the story of how Joe stumbles through life looking for something he thinks only the Smiths can give him. By the time he reaches 30, he's a hard drinking music writer who wants to reunite the Smiths with the help of Miki, the woman he loves. The second half of the book is bit labored, including somewhat redundant cameos by 3/4 of the Smiths, and the life lesson can be seen a mile away, but there's enough funny, moving, and honest stuff here for me to recommend this - as well as great affection for the music. Anyone who has read Nick Hornby will enjoy this ....
Rating:
Summary: coming of age in the 80s
Review: Joe, the product of a divorced home in Long Island, just wants to fit in. He thinks he's found niche when he discovers punk rock, and a group of like minded friends at his new private school, but he really finds the love of his life when he hears the Smiths. HOW SOON IS NEVER is the story of how Joe stumbles through life looking for something he thinks only the Smiths can give him. By the time he reaches 30, he's a hard drinking music writer who wants to reunite the Smiths with the help of Miki, the woman he loves. The second half of the book is bit labored, including somewhat redundant cameos by 3/4 of the Smiths, and the life lesson can be seen a mile away, but there's enough funny, moving, and honest stuff here for me to recommend this - as well as great affection for the music. Anyone who has read Nick Hornby will enjoy this ....
Rating:
Summary: Weak plotline, pathetic characters, sad premise
Review: Look, I adore The Smiths- perhaps not as quite much as Marc Spitz does- but well enough to make the following review of his book worth your consideration. I couldn't help but feel embarrassed- for the author, for his editor and most of all, for members of the band who make cameo appearances toward the end of the story. Character Joe Green's hysterical musings and gushing, obsessive confessions are awkwardly expressed and highly uncomfortable for even the most moderate of Smiths fans to read. I don't know how much of the plot is true- whether the author actually met the members of the band under the conditions described, but true or not- these fellows, Marr, Rourke and Joyce, are REAL PEOPLE (with real careers right now) deserving of respect and accurate representation. Additionally, the story would be much more readable if most of the overly melodramatic coming-of-age business was omitted. The perceived blurred line between fact and fiction is cringeworthy and if Spitz was looking for a cathartic means of exorcising his personal demons, I personally would have preferred that he invent a band to write about, rather than smear around the legacy of a fine group like the Smiths. I understand, perhaps even somewhat identify with the obsessive behaviours of superfans (like Spitz) but expect a bit of restraint from professional writers (like Spitz).
Rating:
Summary: A Pretty Good Book About An Absolutely Brilliant Band
Review: Marc accurately captures the excitement that many of us felt when we first heard all of the amazing music from the U.K. on WLIR in the early to mid '80s. In those days you couldn't download songs using Kazaa, you just had to wait for the song to be played on the radio again so you could hopefully tape it in its entirety. This book isn't for everyone, but it's recommended if you have any nostalgia for the 1980s. Yes, the Smiths are timeless but '80s music was much more than New Wave and New Romanticism; it was really never just about the music. In the end, How Soon Is Never? isn't just about the Smiths.
Rating:
Summary: And all too soon I did return--just like a moth to the flame
Review: Prospective readers, you're forewarned: you may lose track of time if you're reading this on your lunch break (or, uh, at your desk). It's definitely difficult to extricate yourself from this one, especially if your adolescence--which you haven't fully outgrown despite all chronological evidence to the contrary--was defined by the ephemeral beauty of The Smiths. Damaged yet yearning, hapless ex-junkie-cum-downtrodden-bookstore-clerk-cum-voice-of-the-zeitgeist Joe Green knows very well how he got his name, and it's making him feel very mean indeed. Searching for purity & redemption amid the recent spoils of music industry success (read: excess) and the shadows of addiction, fractured family, and failed love, the narrator turns to the seminal songs that "made him cry and the songs that saved his life," crafted by defunct '80's band The Smiths. The first part of _How Soon is Never_? wistfully explores the formative (good and bad) influences in his life: musically, aesthetically, and emotionally. Both on the anxious cusp of 30, Green and equally Smiths-obsessed coworker Miki hatch a plan to exploit their music-biz access by reuniting the band, despite lots of collective legal & emotional water under the bridge. They're convinced that the reunion will be momentous enough to wipe their respective slates clean. But Green is increasingly more concerned with his connection to Miki than that of the four Mancunians; and with the rediscovery of those songs come some of the painful feelings that the music helped as much to articulate as to transcend during his adolescent years. Smiths disciples old and new will seek out Marc Spitz's bildungsroman, which serves quite charmingly as a testament to the special type of bedsit devotion the band inspired among those who fancied themselves "awkward and plain". But the novel's appeal extends to every former lonely teen whose life, in that passionate, territorial, uniquely adolescent way, was irrevocably changed by a pop song. _How Soon is Never?_ is strongest when waxing nostalgic. Spitz evokes that longing for identity & love very well, as Joe's transformation from isolated, Polo clad
middle-schooler who chooses Hall & Oates as two of his personal horsemen of the apocalypse to angry punk to sensitive Wilde-spouting bookworm unfolds. The two love affairs of that time period are well-rendered and poignant, as are his elusive friendship with a fellow prep-school outcast and, especially, the conflicted relationship Joe has with his n'er-do-well father, Sid. The book also succeeds as an amusing send-up of the "alternative" music press (Spitz likens successful rock journalists to vampires and pop-culture narcs, covertly moving among the young, feeding off their trends and selling them back their own pre-fab poison) and the fine line we tread between keeping it real as we grow older and becoming a sad hipster pastiche. Most of all, it perfectly captures a fan's relationship to the music that offered hope and understanding when one needed it most, and the desire to revisit it when times are hard. A tender, witty and highly readable debut novel. I liked it very much.
Rating: 
Summary: An insult to the Smiths, and I'm not even a fan
Review: This book is an insult to the Smiths, and I'm not even a fan of the band. I like their music well enough, though, and respect them for trying to make honest, insightful songs. I like novels about pop and fandom, though, so I picked this up -- what a mistake. This is so self-indulgent it makes Morrissey look positively retiring. There are some good lines, but as a reader you pay for them by slogging through half a dozen bad ones first. I'm not as disappointed in the author, who presumably was trying his best, as in the publisher for trying to fob off this Nick Hornby cash-in. Skip Spitz (and for that matter Hornby, too) and for great writing about fandom and obsession, try Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes. I like football even less than the Smiths, but THAT's great writing.
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