Living the rock and roll lifestyle is like walking around with a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's a dream world where do's and don'ts fail to apply, where excess, rebellion, and all things unspoken or immoral are all par for the course. How else could Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil have gotten off the hook for vehicular homicide?

For the rest of us, there are consequences for our actions. Rock and roll may never die, but many have died trying to keep up with rock and roll.

Vanity Fair columnist and novelist Neal Pollack tackles these themes and others in "Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel," a wildly original and often hilarious look inside the history of American rock music. It's a poignant, infectious blend of fiction and nonfiction, sometimes gritty and always unpredictable. It's brutally faithful to its subject.

The story centers around Paul St. Pierre, an established rock critic assigned to chronicle the life and recent death of Neal Pollack, the "greatest rock journalist who ever lived." Throughout his life, Pollack befriends a young Elvis Presley, gives Lou Reed his first job as a songwriter, starts The Ramones and becomes their original bassist, and adopts a young outsider named Kurt Cobain as his son. He lives, breathes and sleeps rock music, so much so that he tumbles headfirst into the genre's nihilistic traps and pitfalls, leading a life of drugs, alcohol, and debauchery with reckless abandon until mortality catches up with him one day.

Pollack takes big risks with the story, and the element of danger instilled in every page carries the novel to almost mythical heights. It might seem awfully pretentious and self-indulgent for an author to write himself into his own novel as the greatest critic of all time, but his account is so authentic and well researched you'd think he lived the life he documents word for word. Pollack comes across as a youthfully energetic 15-year-old drunk on music, someone completely fascinated and absorbed with every facet of the subject. Every word cracks and sizzles with a feverish, unrestrained style that slaps the reader across the face with every turn of the page.

Fiction and nonfiction as literary forms rarely cross paths, and when they do the results are often mixed. What's interesting about "Never Mind the Pollacks" is how it doesn't try to decipher between fact and fiction, but instead throws the two together with indifference. Pollack doesn't bother himself with what happened and what didn't because it's all just part of the story. He may not be a rock critic in reality, but he is for about 250 pages, and that's all that matters.

Rock music can't be controlled, no matter how hard certain people try to pin it down and define it. "Never Mind the Pollacks" is a novel that remains infallibly true to this sentiment, capturing the chaos and sheer anarchy of every chord, lyric, stage dive and slam dance performed over the past 50 years. From one critic to another, Pollack gets two thumbs up.

Grade: AB