Jeffrey Selbin Faculty Director of East Bay Community Law Center, Clinical Professor of Law

Sound: a Novel by T. M. Wolf

Sound

Described as “the fictional soundtrack to Generation Y” and a “Jack Kerouac of a novel for a new generation,” Tom Wolf’s debut novel Sound is written like a musical score. Of course, if it’s not already clear from these descriptions, the music is hip-hop, and it’s layered with dialogue, thought and emotion (heartbeats) in strips you scan across each page. If Tom wasn’t a former clinic student of mine, thus obviously clouding my judgment, I’d join others in comparing Sound to the early works of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. And don’t be put off by the unusual and innovative format – at its core, the book is about searching and longing and love, the stuff of human existence that transcends generations, making Sound a novel I couldn’t recommend more highly.