Hairstyles of the Damned Review

Hairstyles of the Damned review: rebellion has to become more than a look

Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned asks a sharp question beneath its teenage noise: what good is belonging to an outsider culture if you keep measuring other people by the standards that excluded you? This Hairstyles of the Damned review reads the novel's punk identity through that contradiction. Brian Oswald wants affection, independence, and some protection from embarrassment. Wanting those things does not automatically make him generous. The book's interest lies in the distance between his appetite for freedom and his ability to grant it to someone else.

Published in 2004 by Akashic's Punk Planet Books imprint, the novel follows Brian and his friend Gretchen on Chicago's South Side. The publisher identifies Catholic school conformity, racial division, and class pressure as central concerns. That context gives the adolescent search for identity a social cost: a haircut or a favorite band cannot, by itself, answer the question of how to live with other people. Akashic's book page establishes the setting and publication details.

The resulting proposition is compelling, though the novel's abrasive manners and loose movement will narrow its audience. It suits readers who can distinguish a narrator's emotional candor from moral reliability. Those looking for a smoothly plotted romance, or a comforting portrait of misunderstood young people, should approach with different expectations.

Brian's honesty does not make him innocent

The opening gives a concentrated demonstration of Meno's method. Brian describes his attraction to Gretchen while admitting how readily he would participate in another boy's ridicule of her body. His concern about a school-dance photograph makes the problem especially plain: private tenderness competes with the public image he wants to preserve. The ugliness belongs inside his confession rather than being assigned to a convenient villain. Readers can examine that contradiction directly in the publisher's opening excerpt.

This is an effective basis for a coming-of-age narrator because the reader's sympathy has work to do. Recognizing embarrassment is easy; deciding when embarrassment becomes an excuse for cruelty is harder. Brian's appeal need not depend on agreeing with him. His vulnerability and his failings can occupy the same sentence.

That distinction also gives the novel a useful resistance to wish fulfillment. Being awkward does not confer superior insight. Being attracted to someone does not mean seeing that person clearly. Meno's premise becomes more interesting when Brian's desire for acceptance is treated as a pressure that can deform his judgment, rather than proof that his judgment deserves our trust.

Gretchen exposes the limits of outsider romance

Gretchen is central to that pressure. She occupies the unstable position of a friend whom Brian values and a person whose public reception frightens him. A less demanding story might resolve this tension by making her a reward for his sensitivity. Here the more productive question is whether his sensitivity reaches beyond his own fear of humiliation.

The distinction matters for readers interested in the ethics of first-person fiction. A narrator can fill a page with another person's appearance and still leave that person partly unseen. Attention is not always understanding. Attraction can become another form of possession when every observation circles back to the observer's hopes.

This also identifies a limitation worth watching. Because Brian supplies the narrative frame, Gretchen's significance can be filtered through what she means to him. Readers who want an equally sustained account of her interior life may find that arrangement frustrating. The critical task is to notice the filter rather than mistake his account for a complete description of her. The novel becomes richer when its central relationship is read as a problem of perception as well as a question of romantic possibility.

The mix tape supplies a structural idea

Music is more than a collection of period references here. In a TriQuarterly interview, Meno explains that he wanted the novel's short chapters and changing tempos to resemble a mix tape. That statement provides a useful way to understand its movement: arrangement, contrast, and emotional adjacency can matter as much as a continuous chain of dramatic causes.

The artistic opportunity is clear. A compilation can move from aggression to longing without resolving the difference between them. Applied to fiction, that shape can hold incompatible feelings together rather than forcing a teenager to become articulate before the story has earned it. Changes in pace can register uncertainty, not merely vary the scenery.

The corresponding risk is fragmentation. A reader who needs every episode to advance an unmistakable objective may experience the movement as drift. Appreciating the structural intention does not require pretending that drift cannot become tiring. The relevant question is whether the changing emotional pressure sustains interest when conventional momentum recedes. Readers who enjoy voice and atmosphere as organizing forces have a stronger reason to choose this book than readers seeking escalating suspense.

Punk identity meets race, class, and conformity

Akashic connects the novel to events surrounding a segregated Chicago high-school prom. This gives the book's concern with belonging a harder edge than a general complaint about school rules. Exclusion does not operate only between popular students and their eccentric classmates; a community can reproduce divisions with consequences beyond personal popularity. The publisher's description supplies that historical point of departure without turning the novel into documentary evidence.

The strongest critical reading therefore resists treating punk taste as an automatic certificate of political enlightenment. An alternative scene is still a scene, with its own tests of authenticity and its own opportunities to police membership. Learning the right names can become another way of deciding who deserves attention.

That is the book's most useful tension. Rebellion matters when it changes conduct, not simply when it produces a recognizable identity. The title foregrounds appearance, but the more consequential issue is judgment: who gets dismissed, who gets desired, and whose acceptance seems worth pursuing. A reader can enjoy the cultural specificity while still asking whether the characters' differences from the mainstream lead to meaningful differences in behavior.

Strengths and cautions belong together

Contemporary reception helps clarify what kind of experience to expect. Publishers Weekly's review emphasizes Brian's convincing voice and emotional uncertainty while finding the surrounding plot comparatively slight. It also notes the novel's treatment of teenage violence. Those observations support a measured recommendation: the principal attraction is the pressure of a consciousness, with its contradictory impulses, rather than an exceptionally intricate story.

The roughness is not incidental. Strong profanity, sexual preoccupation, body-shaming, racist attitudes, and physical aggression make this a poor choice for someone seeking gentle adolescent nostalgia. Depiction can invite scrutiny, but scrutiny does not make the material pleasant. Readers should not have to confuse their willingness to encounter that material with proof of literary sophistication.

Nor should humor be treated as an automatic defense. A comic rhythm can expose a character's absurdity, but it can also make another person's injury easier to pass over. The useful reading stance is alert rather than deferential: ask where the laughter points and who bears its cost. That approach preserves the novel's energy while allowing its choices to remain open to criticism.

Who should read it, and what makes a useful alternative?

The ideal reader wants adolescent fiction in which self-discovery includes unflattering discoveries. No expertise in punk discography is necessary to understand wanting a shared language with friends. Familiarity with the music may add recognition, but the deeper attraction is watching cultural taste acquire emotional weight. This is a stronger match for readers interested in social embarrassment, unstable friendship, and compromised rebellion than for anyone primarily seeking a music-history narrative.

For a different treatment of an alienated young voice, consider The Catcher in the Rye. The comparison is useful as a question about narration: how does a speaker invite sympathy while revealing habits that deserve resistance? It should not reduce Brian to a successor in a predetermined literary lineage. What matters is the reader's double awareness of pain and judgment.

Readers more interested in status and self-invention can compare The Great Gatsby. The settings and scales differ, but the juxtaposition sharpens the issue of how another person's gaze helps manufacture desire. What is wanted for its own sake, and what is wanted because possessing it would change how the world sees the self?

For a contrasting approach to dignity and belonging, Jane Eyre provides another productive direction. Reading across these books need not imply that their narrators solve equivalent problems. It can instead reveal different standards by which a story asks us to recognize independence. Meno's novel is particularly useful when readers want those standards to remain entangled with adolescent confusion.

A qualified recommendation with a durable question

Hairstyles of the Damned earns attention through the friction between an appealing desire for freedom and the less appealing habits that desire can conceal. Its music and subcultural setting give that friction a particular vocabulary. Its larger value is the question they make available: does finding your people expand your capacity to recognize others, or merely give your prejudices a new wardrobe?

That question supports the recommendation more convincingly than a promise that every reader will find Brian charming. Some will find his voice exhausting; others will miss a firmer narrative spine. Those are substantial preferences, not failures to understand the book. For readers willing to inhabit an awkward, abrasive perspective while retaining their own judgment, Meno offers a coming-of-age premise with moral resistance built into it. The point of becoming yourself is left demanding enough to remain worth considering after the music stops.