Jack Frusciante Has Left the Band: A Love Story- with Rock 'n' Roll

The setting: Bologna, Italy, under a sky "as eloquent as a block of cast iron." The hero: Alex, a bright and bored 18-year-old. The genre: coming of age. Alex, anticipating a future of bun-numbing, bourgeoisie-induced boredom and hopelessly in love, takes up with the briskly degenerate--albeit empathic--Martino. Drinking, drugging, and rock-and-roll fill the void left, or created, by Alex's realization of the banality of existence. Enrico Brizzi writes with an insider's view of life in the band--he himself played in a rock band before he was thrown out for bad conduct. What lifts Jack Frusciante Has Left the Band above the more predictable aspects of the coming-of-age story is its tone: energetic and crackling with irony. The author, already a sensation at 22, has become one of Italy's biggest sellers. With the easy, slangy conversational style of The Catcher in the Rye, Brizzi's second novel paints an endearing picture of contemporary youth outrageously scrambling for meaning.