The night (alone)

Not since the days of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski has a writer launched a book so fearlessly from the uncharted interior of the male spirit. Richard Meltzer's The Night (Alone) is a daring and hilarious probe of life at middle age, and perhaps the most uncensored exploration ever published of the forces - libidinal, alcoholic, creative, perverse - that drive most men's lives. Richard Meltzer has been known for years as one of the first and greatest rock 'n' roll writers and a fiercely imaginative cultural critic. Now, in his first novel, he creates several characters very much like the…