King
for a Queen and Stuck
on a Bad Nigga by Chanel Q.; The
Turner House by Angela Flournoy; The
Fall of Japan by William Craig; Preparation
for the Next Life by Atticus Lish; Hello
Devilfish! by Ron Dakron.
I read for entertainment, hoping always
for a tour de force, regardless of genre. Use of language is paramount, and style
matters more than plot, although a jolt of the appalling may help clarify one’s
thinking. So, bold and original works for me, stupid and over-the-top is good, excess
I’m all in favor of. I like to be dazzled with flamboyance and bullshit, or authenticity
and taste, in epic or flash, from the rodeo to the ballet as far as how words move
across the page.
The city, the urban situation, informs
the six books discussed here. And when language transcribed
from the street comes to the page rendered faithfully to its purpose, I sit up
and take notice. Here are two smokin’ samples from Chanel Q.:
- Full-sleeve tats, face tats, thick chains, True Religion jeans and banging kicks everywhere. It was like a who’s who of Chicago’s finest trap daddies and hoes and I was right there in the middle of them all.
- You
find out about that boy of his, that Troy. How he rolls, how he fucks,
where he lays his head, where he mama at when he up some bitch’s pussy.
And then an angel arrives and writes a beautiful novel, formidable
and fierce and as urban as you can get with almost no profanity because the
vernacular is so well written. The Turner House is a radiant story of a
family 13 kids and their two parents living in Detroit in the late 20th,
early 21st century, created in a steady, writerly language, so vivid
and pretty, themed with hope, and strength, and inspiration, represented by
this passage:
It reassured Lelah that
the ghetto could still hold beauty, and that streets with this much new life
could still have good in them. On both sides of the Turner house, vacant lots
were stippled with new grass. Soon ragweed, wood sorrel and violets would
surround the crumbling foundations, the houses long burned and rained away.
After the glimpses of black lives in contemporary Chicago,
Baltimore and Detroit, William Craig
chronicles another time—1945, the end of World War II in the Pacific theater—and
other lives—Filipino—and another city—Manila, for example.
Manila, “Jewel of the Orient,” had been systematically
burned to the ground by the desperate marines and sailors of the Japanese Navy,
acting under orders to deny the capital of the Philippines to the enemy. During
MacArthur’s three-week siege in February 1945, Filipinos had died by the
thousands as Japanese troops, inflamed by desperation and reckless abandon, had
used them mercilessly. Mass rapes, multiple assaults on young women and little
girls, had been perpetrated in streets and hallways. Columns of men and women
had been doused with gasoline and set ablaze. Others had been tied together and
bayoneted to death. In hospitals, nuns, nurses and patients had been stripped,
raped and killed. Mutilated corpses had lain everywhere among the ruins. Manila
had paid a terrible price for its freedom.
Continuing
the urban and now Asian thread, the Lish book is a contemporary love story, set
in the lower depths of New York City, between a homeless young American male military
veteran back from the Middle East wars and a Chinese woman, immigrant,
undocumented, and scrambling to stay alive working in menial jobs such as housekeeping
and food service. Because the surroundings and situations are so basic and desperate,
I kept waiting for the novel to
break out into Cormac McCarthy-esque savagery, and
hoping it wouldn’t; and while formidable tension and menace is created, Lish
has a different world view. The story contains unexpected,
almost breathtaking acts of mercy, unexpected because they occur in the unrelentingly
dangerous, rough, cold streets of poor, urban America, but breathtaking also
because they are strong and simple kindnesses, true acts of mercy, not based on
bartering sex or drugs or weapons, the touch of a saint.
What endeared me to the Lish book is how he treats his Uighur protagonista,
Zhou Lei, how she uses language to navigate the alien world she finds herself
in: yes there is the need to learn American English, but her deportable status
creates a residency of off-the-books, low paying survival jobs which means working
with other Chinese who speak dialects which she doesn’t know, not to mention
the language of the Guatemalans and Hondurans and other Central Americans who
make up her workplaces, people from India, Syria, Pakistan, people from Africa.
“Not
too many people knowing what’s Uighur people.
I just think no matter any kind of people, to stay in the US it’s not
easy right now.”
For me, a monolingual English speaker, it is
interesting and exciting to be living in the USA right now, witness to the
evolution of English prompted by our variety of communities and races and
ethnicities. Lish is good at
capturing the melding speech. Zhou Lei on:
- Chinese medicine:
“It can cure many things that
the Western medicine feels helpless.”
- Or: I will invite you the real Chinese
food.
- Or: You go to party. I’m not jealousy.
- Or: He
ask if he make it spice or not spice.
I call it an affectionate look at language synthesis,
and Lish is on the down low, quiet and naturalistic, his spare English prose
helping to frame the poetically emerging new language.
But Ron Dakron is over the top, bombastic and
freaky about it. He uses the same American-Asian
hybrid, but he calls it “Manglish!: With wordage like I touched a
tiny sawdust or Let’s have a biology.”
And he situates
his satirical, comic riot bizarro megamonster lover’s brawl in yet another
urban area, Tokyo (whose landmarks, while routinely destroyed by giant movie
monsters, are not as often destroyed
by giant movie monsters as you may think. In fact, some experts say Tokyo is
only the 10th most destroyed by giant movie monsters city in the
history of motion pictures.)
The giant Devilfish versus the giant Squidra.
Battle. Big scary monsters powered by “love—that
rogue emotion that paves your heart with hot pink asphalt, that excuse for any
excess,” combined with hello kitty
killer tropes and memes and epistemes as well as a frenzy of remarks aggressive,
intelligent, sexist, insightful, rude and playful and crude. After all, “Brains are magic tricks done with meat.”
It’s all loud and ginormous and
fast. And while Dakron’s gigantors are destroying
(figuratively and in real time) each other and civilization like it was a
saloon in a bar brawl in the Old West, I’m also loving the Gertrude Stein pheromones being released to the
millionth degree in the Manglish-aided lines of which four randomly chosen are these:
- I see much of a kitten here!
- Her lateness angers me glumly!
- Never use fate as your caterer!
- I am bitter with cunning!
The better part of the novel is
outrageous and vulgar word play and cultural disquisition. The observations are keen, and the comic timing
is impeccable. A reader will probably be simultaneously laughing out loud and taking
offense. Or as the title character says:
“What doesn’t kill you almost kills
you—Hello Devilfish!”
www.randystark.com
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