The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice
by Greil Marcus
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($25)

This diffuse, frustrating, and occasionally brilliant book continues in the vein of cultural criticism that Greil Marcus has made his own over the last thirty years. Starting in 1975 with the now-classic Mystery Train, Marcus has spent his entire career working variations on one fairly simple idea: that the story of American culture, its central truths, are communicated in diverse, sometimes public, sometimes private ways. By finding common ground in the voices that speak from the margins of art and society, he hopes to uncover truths that are inaccessible to the mainstream.

The Shape of Things to Come brings the same strategy to a different set of voices. Marcus’s themes tend to resist compression, but the organizing principle here is the delineation of a peculiarly and identifiably American voice that speaks in the Puritan tradition of prophecy–not as a prediction of future events, but as an apocalyptic expression of the sometimes contradictory promises the nation has made to itself.

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