The best novels to read if your rock ‘n’ roll party days are over

Lowry is the best stylist in the history of the English Language bar two other classic writers—Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. 

The amount of alcohol consumed in this brutally beautiful novel is staggering to say the least. Its zesty darkness and, er, volcanic poetry is a stone-cold trip. If you don’t remember (or never tasted) mescal or that time you had too many margaritas, Lowry’s masterpiece will do you well. 

If you’re over thirty you should have outgrown your infatuation with Papa by now, methinks; but still it’s nice to revisit this lark of a roman a clef.

You’ll either shudder or joy (or both) at the scenes where the roisterers on the bus are shooting wine into each others’ mouths via boda bag. Did I spell boda bag properly? It’s been a long time, mate.

I like to recommend difficult books—everyone needs a challenge once in a while and the nihilist Huysmans kind of throws down a literary gauntlet here in that he’s sort of daring you to go with him to the abysses of the modern soul. 

This book is indeed way more psychedelic than any 60’s Beat guy or girl ever penned or dreamed.

Szalay sort of exposes—in the most subtle of ironic ways—how men delude themselves with respect to their intentions, their character, their attitudes towards work and women, and all the concomitant notions of competition contained therein.

He's got, it seems to me, a quite Hobbesian worldview going—and that, to me, is refreshing! Of course the writing is for the most part beautiful; but not too beautiful, not too embellished. A bit plangent. A bit lapidary.

One thing I would say is, reading him, I am sometimes tempted to cut the last sentence of his chapters. He often ends with a note, as it were, that strikes me as bathetic. I wonder if in some way he doesn't trust the reader. 

Cutting the last sentence:  that's an old New Yorker magazine trick and I think—even though this may sound presumptuous—his prose'd benefit from it.

This isn’t a particularly party-hearty (hardly?) novel, seeing as the music nerds satirized (and glorified) are mostly just f’ed up on wax, not honey oil or absinthe or something.  It will indeed make you laugh and give others a contact high of hilarity if they’re in the same room with you.