Fifteen years ago, Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds and Influences of the Beach Boys’ Founding Genius (Reference Lambert2007) inaugurated an academically rigorous era in studies of the auteur behind Pet Sounds and ‘Good Vibrations’. Dale Carter's Reading Smile: History, Myth and American Identity in Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ Long-Lost Album epitomises the forensic analysis encouraged by Lambert, who died from a brain tumour in 2022. Yet whereas Inside the Music detailed Brian Wilson's compositional innovations, Reading Smile examines the lyrical content of the ill-fated 1966–1967 magnum opus intended to establish the Beach Boys’ 24-year-old singer/songwriter/producer as his generation's Virgil Thomson or Charles Ives.

Wisely, Carter avoids fixating on the legend of the project's collapse, when Wilson, beleaguered by bandmate opposition and unable to cohere his ambitions, pulled the plug, making Smile ‘the best-known unreleased album in pop music history’ (p. 1). Countless biographies, documentaries and movie adaptations have told that story, the most recent celebrating the album's belated ‘completion’ in 2004, when Wilson's devoted coterie exorcised the traumatic failure for him with a lavishly praised reassembly LP called Brian Wilson Presents Smile.

Instead, Reading Smile takes an American studies approach to the song cycle's epic aim to weigh colonialist westering's consequences while celebrating the elements as fonts of spiritual revivification. The result is an invigorating close reading and cultural dissection that demonstrates how thoroughly Smile encapsulates the ‘old, weird America’ that Greil Marcus has spent a career delineating in Bob Dylan (p. 14). Indeed, Carter implicitly rebukes Marcus and other naysayers like Dave Marsh, who dismiss the project's signature songs (‘Heroes and Villains’, ‘Surf's Up’ and ‘Cabin Essence’) as pretentious and less innovative than the Beach Boys’ early hits (‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and ‘I Get Around’).

Reading Smile's preliminary accomplishment is to credit lyricist Van Dyke Parks for the album's thematic gravitas. Typically, Parks is treated either as an amanuensis with a thesaurus, providing the notoriously monosyllabic Wilson with cryptic wordplay secondary to his sonic vistas, or he is derided as a dandyish scenester spewing ‘acid alliteration’, as the Beach Boys’ lead singer, Mike Love, charged at the time (p. 4). Yet Parks ‘brought to the collaboration not only historical, social and cultural knowledge but also an established interest in creative writing that would enable him to articulate his and their ideas’ (p. 28). Without his ‘imagery and wordplay, allusions, quotations’ and his ‘high-connotation sketches of archetypal scenarios, processes and subjects’ (pp. 28, 38), Smile would lack its intertextual framework, which is as broad as the ocean and continent that its westward-bound plot roves. References include Wordsworthian innocence, Native American naturalism and the ‘Puritan jeremiad’ whose lamentations against lost purpose prompts ‘atonement and recovery’ (p. 30) – albeit it not in the form a good Puritan would imagine. Perhaps the project's greatest irony is that the culminating Emersonian bliss of ‘Good Vibrations’ is not the wordsmith's work at all: it features lyrics by Smile's greatest detractor, Love.

Carter impressively elucidates Parks's encyclopedic allusiveness by citing his own engrossing spectrum of American historiography. For him, the gunfighter/Mexican earth goddess tragicomedy ‘Heroes and Villains’ evokes Frederick Jackson Turner's ‘frontier thesis’ (p. 41), painter John Gast's telegraph-as-manifest-destiny tableau American Progress (1872) (p. 45) and Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 historical romance Ramona (p. 45); ‘Cabin Essence’, with its chilling choral simulations of a chugging ‘iron horse’, inspires quotations from Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (1964) (p. 66) alongside an ingenious application of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855) to the lyric that incensed Love (‘Over and over, the crow flies/Uncover the cornfield’; pp. 68–9, 73). The ‘Indian Princess’ persona of the lilting ‘Wonderful’, meanwhile, draws analogies to Paiute advocate Sarah Winnemucca's 1883 autobiography Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (p. 91), while Smile's most terrifyingly diaphanous track, ‘Surf's Up’, its verses already rich in dark allusions to Maupassant and Poe (p. 118), also conjures up Isiah 11:6 and Puritan minister John Winthrop with its sermonic insistence that ‘the children know the way’ (p. 99). Carter's references are not gratuitous; they situate Parks's dense libretto in American symbology so the critic can parse the self-contradictions inherent in invoked tropes like the errand into the wilderness (pp. 44, 52, 67, 74, 112, 127), the home on the range (pp. 61–2, 68), Plymouth Rock (pp. 61, 68, 112, 114, 121–9), the ‘bicycle rider’ (pp. 42–4, 50, 55, 87) and the ‘church of the American Indian’ (pp. 91, 96, 121, 128).

These contradictions are important because they dramatise the challenge of form that flustered Wilson and ultimately contributed to Smile's shelving. Composed and recorded as ‘modular components’ (p. 137), Wilson's fragmented mini-suites eluded cohesion in part because the collaborators struggled with the concept of narrative shape. As Carter demonstrates, Parks's lyrics build upon tensions between linear storytelling structures (teleology, typology) and cyclical patterns, with images of the Judeo-Christian Fall counterposed against more multicultural, more elemental rebirth and rejuvenation motifs that interrogate the nationalistic revitalisation pined for in most American mythologies of renewal. Through these juxtapositions, Parks tried to imagine an American Adam and Eve who might elude the recapitulated genocides and ecocides of manifest destiny (such as was then occurring in Vietnam, for example). With Wilson mired in indirection, resolution proved inarticulable.

Only in 2004, by ending Smile with ‘Good Vibrations’ (which in hindsight seems inevitable) did Wilson's team, with Parks's guarded participation, find resolution. As Carter argues, the answer was not via narrative climax (rebirth/redemption) but through the figuration of the ‘wave’ as the model trajectory of natural energy: not only those ‘ever lovin’’ vibrations we ‘gotta keep happenin’’, but

Simply stated, Reading Smile is the most exacting explication we now have of a project that should have been pop music's answer to Appalachian Spring or The Tender Land: an experimental fusion of Aaron Copland's syncretising sweep of (white) American vernacular music and Hart Crane's High Modernist imagism that could have voiced the 1960s’ youth/rock utopian yearnings with symphonic erudition. Carter demonstrates that the music Wilson and Parks briefly made together is significant far beyond the oft-told tale of its abandonment, and Wilson and the Beach Boys’ subsequent plunge into artistic irrelevance. Ideally, this study will prompt more mappings of the New World and terra incognita mythologies that make Smile so much more intellectually appreciable than its reputed opacity may, on the face of it, make it seem.