Audacity, execution, authority, oomph, heft, humor — the most enjoyable, truly enlightened, contemporary novel originally written in the English language I’ve read in a long, long time.
I read some of the author’s first novel after it came out back when I lived in Brooklyn and a friend recommended it but I didn’t make my way too far through it, thinking it too derivative of Ishmael Reed, whose Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo I read in college and loved.
Now, the influence still seems there, the hyperbolic po-mo humor, at times like Mark Leyner walking the satirical high wire of serious sociological significance, but the overall world of the novel, delineated by Dickens LA with a DC frame, plus the wholly characterized characters and the inside jokes and the little pokes at Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis, and the like, the obscure side-references loaded up in the last slot of a sentence’s comic series, the clarity of every sentence and paragraph and the macro-level audacity, the old-fashioned yet not at all sentimental father/son story, it’s safe to say that he’s successfully integrated the Ishmael Reed, who’s name-checked at one point, and individuated.
Reading this every day on the Philly subway, wondering what the primarily black passengers think of this white guy reading a book with lawn jockeys on the cover, and wondering more so what someone might think when they read over my shoulder, was probably one of the best possible places to read this, especially when the story gave way to racism-related essayistic stretches.
Nothing is necessarily unknown that he says but the total package delivered with such humor, energy, authentic intelligence (no Wittgenstein quotations!), with such alacrity and pizzazz (as an old prep-school football coach I had used to say about how we should execute drills), with insider info on the LA surf scene to boot and references to Sun Ra and Lee Morgan, and Adam Youch I guess, the total package hangs together so well and articulates the complexity of everything in the most effective possible way.
The writing, the language, always guns it, veering around corners to find unexpected obstacles it blows right through — one of the most exciting, refreshing, funny novels I’ve read, as soon as I’m done writing this I’ll find a home for it on the bookshelf I reserve for major favorites.