The Bard of Asbury Park

RUNAWAY AMERICAN DREAM

Listening to Bruce Springsteen

By Jimmy Guterman

Da Capo. 246 pp. Paperback, $15.95

MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER

Stories Inspired by the Haunting

Bruce Springsteen Song

Edited by Jessica Kaye and Richard J. Brewer

Bloomsbury. 206 pp. Paperback, $14.95

Is there a gloomier landscape in pop music than the one painted by Bruce Springsteen? The poet laureate of the New Jersey swamps has got to be the biggest buzzkill of the rock era. No one else with his rarefied credentials comes close. While things get better all the time for the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones are having their noses blown, Springsteen's protagonists regularly undergo thrashings that border on the sadistic. You can't imagine Highway Patrolman Joe Roberts wearing diamonds on the soles of his shoes or Johnny 99 exhorting everybody to get stoned. And it's not just folky flagellations like "Nebraska" that wallow in the darkness on the edge of town. Springsteen's most popular collection, "Born in the U.S.A.," is a Xanax-defying litany of failing marriage, racial violence, joblessness, statutory rape and postwar meltdown. "Born down in a dead man's town/The first kick I took was when I hit the ground" is how the album says hello. You don't know whether to dance or slit your wrists.

The danger is that songs like "Downbound Train" devolve into self-parody because all it ever does is rain -- unless, to truly shatter our hearts, Springsteen gives us a glimpse of sunshine before he snatches it away. "The River" packs a wallop not because of unwanted pregnancy or construction-crew layoffs -- standard Springsteen yada yada, after all -- but because the narrator remembers a time when he pulled his lover close, just to feel her breathing.