Elvis - A Lighted Candle

[Rainbow Light]

In Search of Elvis: Music, Race, Art, Religion. Vernon Chadwick, ed. Boulder: Westview Press. 1997. 294 pages.

Nick Tosches is pretty prophetic. Twenty years ago in his book Country: Living Legends and Dying Metaphors in America's Biggest Music, Tosches concluded that "Elvis Presley will never be solved." Elvis, like Vietnam, JFK, and most recently, O. J. Simpson, represents a cultural touchstone text whose proliferating puzzle pieces remain missing decades after the fact.

Over the years, the Elvis library, initially a collection defined primarily by opportunistic biographers and an endless parade of Presley family, friends, and associates (hairdressers, housekeepers, cooks, karate instructors, ad nauseam) relating their Elvis experiences, has expanded to include virtually every literary and subliterary genre, from cholesterol-crammed King cookbooks, encyclopedias, comic books, children's stories, art catalogs, and quote- and graffiti-compilations to travel guides, photo journals, parodies, poems, parables, and Presley pulp fiction. The fascination with Elvis as a subject among the literati is evident in the number of anthologies that began appearing in the early 1990s: The Elvis Reader (Quain, 1992), Elvis Rising (Sloan and Pierce, 1993), Mondo Elvis (Ebersole and Peabody, 1994), and The King Is Dead (Sammon, 1994).

Also emerging alongside the catalog of factual fiction and fictional facts have been more serious critical voices and views, with the works of longtime Elvis observers, cultural critic Greil Marcus (Dead Elvis) and historian Peter Guralnick (Last Train to Memphis), among the more notable and insightful.

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Marling and Chadwick contribute fresh approaches to examining the polysemous, polymythic Presley text. Graceland: Going Home with Elvis is not as much a tour or catalog crammed with kitsch, clutter, cliches, and Jungle Room jokes as it is an intimate journey across the miles and meanings surrounding "the material guy's" dream home. The text feels like a travel journal, brimming with reflections, keen observations, and moving anecdotes. Marling's prose is refreshingly novelesque, witty, conversational, and image-laden. The cultural historian's detailed descriptions provide a stunning sense of place--both interior and exterior; a sense of style and stuff--both secret and sacred; and a sense of taste, home, and self.