My review of the American edition is here
https://c--noise.blogspot.com/2011/02/simon-reynolds-rip-it-up-and-start.html
I’ve finally got my hands on the original U.K. edition, which I find is actually 800 pages long, twice the heavily abridged version I read 15 years ago. And of course I forgot a lot of the stuff I already read, it’s been so long. Entire chapters got ripped out, like the one on Magazine/Subway Sect. Currently on the Fall/Joy Division chapter which....is exactly the same as I remember, it seemingly survived the U.S. butchering.

Finished: Brian Garfield - Death Wish. I’ve never seen the movie but I’m betting it’s better than the original novel, which is only 177 pages. It ends really abruptly with a cop who sees the main character offing some teenage hoodlums but instead of taking him in, turns away as if the cop approves of his vigilantism. It takes him a long bout of psychological struggling with his wife’s death to turn into the Punisher - it’s literally 3/4 into the book before he gets around to killing anyone, leaving the action movie of the final quarter feeling really rushed. And there’s no real conclusion - apparently he wrote a sequel, Death Sequence, a couple of years later that finishes what appears to be an unfinished draft. For such a short novel there’s quite a bit of boring stretches covering his job as a mild mannered accountant.

As for the subject matter - well, it’s very dated. New York isn’t the urban hellhole it was in the ’70s. 1972 was a long time ago and this fable of a meek middle class liberal who gets mugged by reality shows a world where even nice liberals hold attitudes that wouldn’t even pass muster in Mississippi these days. He almost offs a pair of “faggots” for walking down the street but decides to live and let live, they’re doing no harm to anyone. Someone once pointed out that there are lots of movies about conservatives seeing the light and becoming better human beings as liberals, but none of the reverse. Well, here’s your answer. This liberal becomes a right winger and a worse human being.

I have mixed feelings about this book. While its flaws are obvious, it’s still fascinating as a grim portrait of urban reality during an inherently interesting period of American history. Like Rabbit Redux and some other novels from the late 60s/early 70s. Apparently Brian Garfield disliked the movie because Charles Bronson was too much of a tough guy archetype and wanted someone wimpy like Dustin Hoffman to be closer to the novel’s theme of meek accountant gone Punisher. Uh…Straw Dogs has more or less Hoffman doing that same kind of character in 1971.