The Sellout by Paul Beatty

An urban farmer comes up with a plan to help his people

Bonbon, homeschooled by his black studies professor father, the last (or only) farmer in Dickens, a blighted neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, finds himself in a funk after his dad is shot during a routine traffic stop and bleeds to death on the street. Reluctant slave owner of the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, and spurned lover of MTA bus driver intellectual Marpessa Dawson, Bonbon decides that the way to put Dickens back on the map and inspire its underachieving black and Mexican populace is to resegregate. Strangely enough, his plan begins to work, but not before outraging the country. The book opens and closes with Bonbon at the Supreme Court, defending his case.

This book rubs the reader’s face in outrageous racial stereotypes (as well as perhaps some subtle ones – significant chunks of the book are in fairly hilarious Latin). The meager oft mislaid plot is secondary to the poetic riffing on what it means to be black, to be an Angeleno, to be the child of a nutty professor trying to forcibly mold a child free of internalized white judgments. And also what it means to be a black man in a racist society. Or an amazing farmer who makes friends all over town by growing the sweetest oranges and the most kaleidoscopic weed.

The cadences are amazing – this book must have taken forever to write. The elaborately crazy sentences force the reader to slow down, to linger, to take pleasure. For the most part the imagery is beautiful, despite Bonbon’s journey always bumping him against unpleasant racist realities.  I loved the scene where Marpessa takes her newly resegregated city bus and drives it up Pacific Coast Highway onto the beach so that Bonbon and Hominy and the night shift at Jack-in-the-Box can go skinny dipping. This truly is a book about Los Angeles – how its beauty is a secret pleasure enjoyed by its laid back inhabitants. There’s freeway rides in here and surfing and the beans at Tito’s Tacos.

If you laugh at the outlandish stereotyping, are you racist? Maybe there’s a scene in the book that addresses that – maybe the answer is yes. Also, I wasn’t sure about the title – who’s selling out? Bonbon is nicknamed The Sellout by Foy Chesire, his father’s wealthy nemesis, who rewrites classic books for African Americans, such as Measured Expectations. But isn’t Foy is the real sellout?

This would make a great movie with some great scenes of LA but that would never happen.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

A girl, a woman, and a horse.

Velveteen Vargas, 11 year old daughter to an illiterate Dominican immigrant, gets a chance to visit the country as a Fresh Air Fund kid. Her foster parents, Ginger and Paul, live near a rundown stable, and in that stable, caged, for she is too aggressive to run free, is a scarred horse called Fiery Girl, disparagingly referred to as “Fugly Girl.” But Velvet has a calming effect on the dangerous horse. Velvet's love for horses and riding grows and it is soon revealed she is a natural equestrienne. Meanwhile, Ginger feels a powerful bond with the disadvantaged child while realistic Paul feels she ignores his commonsense advice about getting too involved.  Also maybe he feels that she ignores him. As Velvet enters adolescent, she encounters the boys of the neighborhood, who are at danger of being shot, and falls in love with one. Meanwhile, Silvia, Velvet's mother, attempts to beat the waywardness out of Velvet and resents the pull this white couple and what they have to offer has on the girl. She says they treat Velvet like a pet. The story always heads toward the climax, the competition with the white girls at the upscale stable.

This novel is plotted like a children’s book (specifically National Velvet), but written with high technical virtuosity, bringing the characters and the conflict to life using brief (sometimes only a paragraph) first person narrations. The writing and the imagery are simple and beautiful, showcasing the unmitigated pain of the characters. Velvet, seemingly unloved apart from a dead grandfather, childless recovering alcoholic Ginger, mourning the death of her mentally ill sister. And Fiery Girl, unable to trust, after being brutally punished by an earlier owner. The three are able to comfort each other, but only partially and only temporarily.

Nominally about a girl and a horse, the book is actually about so much more. This is about race and class in America, the huge and perhaps irremediable differences these two things make in the stability of people’s lives. It’s hard to be even tempered when there’s not enough money for rent, or when your mother’s unsavory tenant molests you, or every boy you know seems to get shot. Like Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood, one of the points of the book is social commentary, presenting a first person narration of American society from someone at the margins, someone not possessing or using the vocabulary of the elite.

In addition to the brilliantly written prose, I also enjoyed the way the tension was skillfully, almost unbearably, ratcheted up, as the plot points planted near the end of each section detonated. One of the questions asked (and not answered) is why do people have such painful lives and why do those people end up making things more painful? The final scene, Velvet’s triumph is also, (I guess) her defeat.

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

A man and his imagination build a world for himself

Gustavo Highway Sanchez Sanchez is the eccentric hook on which hangs this intellectually impressive literary compendium. He is an itinerant auctioneer, a loquacious story teller, starting from the Beginning, the story of his birth, as a “tiny brown swollen blog fish”, then wandering into the Hyperbolics, the Parabolics, the Circulars, the Allegorics, the Elliptics and finally the Chronologics. There’s an extended sequence of a church sanctioned auction of some old teeth to a congregation of dementia patients. Highway manages to link the teeth to the greatest minds/mouths of European civilization. The book is a mosaic of off-the-wall tall tales. Finally there is an Afterword, (actually a graphical timeline) which Luiselli’s translator contributed.  The entire work is based on collaboration, in fact, with the employees of Jumex, a Mexican juice factory.

This book felt very Latin American, that is, taking silliness extremely seriously, using the flights of fancy as springboard to communicate life truths. There’s loads here, packed into 200 pages (and plenty of white space.) This is not a book the reader can blast through, the stories needs to be savored, to be considered. I’m not completely sure this was my cup of tea, however. I viewed the story of Highway and his troubles with a detached amusement and I prefer being passionately transported.

Radio Iris by Anne-Marie Kinney

A receptionist slowly starts to understand her job truly is a sham

Iris Finch, well meaning receptionist at a typical Los Angeles firm in a Class C office building, each morning dutifully arrives to perform her mundane duties.  Her boss is odd, occasionally abrupt, fond of making urgent calls from far off locales; the guy in the office next door is even weirder and apparently seems to be making the office his residence.  Iris becomes obsessed with this tenant, passing little notes beneath his door and tucked under his windshield wipers.  She also has a college friend who tries unsuccessfully to set Iris up with a man.  On these dates, Iris seems to be actively trying to repel the guy.  There are recurring alternating narratives with her brother and the aftermath of a tragic long ago (yet somewhat comical) accident.  The resonating ending has Iris descending into a new world, then escaping with her life just before everything caves in.

For anyone who has ever worked a temp job, (especially in Los Angeles), Iris’s tale is very recognizable.  The calm acquiescence in absurdities, the precious minutes of lunch break, the getting and spending of office supplies.  The brother’s story didn’t really tie to anything – maybe we needed those chunks of semi normality to break up the airlessness of Iris’s world view.  But the claustrophobia, the absurdity, of Iris executing her meaningless job is the whole point of this novel, right?  This reminded me of Vida and Vida reminded me of Cusk.  So I’ve been reading a lot of stories lately of neurotics cast into otherworldly, absurd, situations.  The narrators must decide what they will do once they are embedded in the unnatural situations.  The genuine pleasures of reading these books do not come from the plot but from the increasingly suffocating atmosphere.  An atmosphere both comic and recognizable.  Maybe modern work lacks meaning.  The author is good at cranking up the tension, such as skillfully deploying a piano, as the story progresses.

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

A visitor to Morocco loses her identity

Our nameless narrator (one of twins) is, on her very first day in Casablanca, the victim of a particularly skillful pickpocket, losing her passport, credit card and money.  (First thing to do in Casablanca is to get out of Casablanca.)  She has no way to prove who she is. After several bumbling attempts at assistance, the intimidating police chief hands her another woman’s backpack, insisting that the case has been solved. The narrator uses the other woman’s credit card to rent a luxury hotel room. She turns to the US embassy, but soon becomes convinced the US Embassy is about to discover all her stupid dishonesties.  At her wit’s end, it luckily turns out she is an exact body double for the famous actress shooting a movie in Casablanca and our narrator gets a paying job.  But her body double acting is so good, on screen and off , that the famous movie star gets enraged. Just in the nick of time, and with the help of another astonishing coincidence, our narrator escapes being found out yet once again. In addition, at the end, the big secret from back home is perfectly detonated.

I really enjoyed this novel, although for most readers, this may be an esoteric pleasure, an extended joke, a meditation on identity. Critical bundles get stolen, seemingly nice doubles stab the heroine in the back.  There are also a lot of costume changes. The pleasure comes in the narrator’s increasing paranoia, her off the chart neuroticism and overall ineffectiveness. I kept reassuring myself: This could never happen, could it?

The book was perfectly crafted; the narrator never wears out her welcome in any particular role. This is one of the few novels I have read recently where the intensity properly increased as the story went on, and the “secret” was opportunely presented. The narrator doesn’t really go to all that much trouble to retrieve her identity, because if, at any point, she ever did the logical thing, the story would end. Finally, the book was hilarious – there definitely is a Keystone Kops thing going on.

In the Fold by Rachel Cusk

A thirty something married man visits a family of eccentrics

The novel opens with college boy Michael receiving an invitation to a party at his friend Adam’s family estate, Egypt. There he encounters the rest of the Hanburys: grouchy contrarian patriarch Paul; first wife Vivian, fashionably blonde; dour second wife Vivian; and an eccentric pack of maladjusted children. However, at this first meeting, most of their names rush over Michael’s head and it isn’t until years later, when Michael has settled down with his own beautiful yet moody wife Rebecca, and preverbal three year old Hamish, that the two friends reconnect. Adam asks Michael to help with the lambing on Egypt for a week. Hijinks ensue, but the hijinks center around the restraints of marriage and family. The prevailing opinion of the book is thumbs down on both.

A fold of sheep is dumb; the fold of family is dumber. Each Hanbury seems unhappy, if not trapped, and it isn’t very long before the reader realizes that first person narrator Michael is trapped as well. The writing is hilarious, vivid, like PG Wodehouse, a contrapuntal masterpiece of hilarity. Each character has a tic, a lamentation and a typical page has at least one crazily inventive metaphor. Although sometimes the parade of laugh lines can seem relentless and the ultimate meaning of the book feels obscure. 

This book resembles a This Country Life, but This Country Life made a certain sort of narrative sense and the end of that book contained a well plotted surprise. This end of this book is merely the end of a series of fascinating patterns. There may be, in fact, perhaps one too many characters for the reader to keep track of. I want to reread this book, not because of the depth of the theme or the imagery, but so I can figure out what’s going on. I sense that lots is going on, lots about marriages and families and how, deep down, they all hate each other.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

In every way, white society emasculates the black man

These eight stories are glimpses into people’s lives.  They are about a repressed boy from a Pentecostal home, a struggling actor who can never feel at ease, a math teacher trying to do right by his heroin addicted brother, and an aspiring woman fearful her lover will abandon her. What seven of the eight stories have in common is the negative effect society’s racism has upon people just trying to build a life, and the way racism insidiously corrodes self confidence on both sides of the equation. My favorite stories were “Previous Condition” and “Come Out the Wilderness.” “Previous Condition” is about an actor who wants to live a fulfilling artistic life, but is unable to because everywhere he goes in white New York; he is reminded of his inferior status, his sub humanity. He can’t rent an apartment, he can’t raise his voice to his white girlfriend without fear of being lynched, he cannot participate in artistic society. Only when he travels uptown to Harlem he can be freer, but only a little, because there he cannot live the intellectually and emotionally fulfilled life he longs for. In either world, he cannot be who he is. “Come Out the Wilderness” is about a professional young secretary, who supports a white lover and is terrified of his leaving her. Meanwhile, the professional black man at her workplace is interested in her. She is aware she is wasting her life, but can’t help herself.

Boy, were these stories bleak. In Baldwin’s world, there is no hope. The characters are pushed to the point of desperation. An air of sadness permeates this collection. I’m not completely sure these stories were my cup of tea. Perhaps my expectations were too high – I was expecting each story to be a literary masterwork, and the collection was uneven. Some of the stories felt a little dated, at times a little false. The writing was old fashioned, although monumental and authoritative. The prose reminded me of Flannery O’Connor but without the humor. A reoccurring incident is the innocent child being called a racial slur. Also policemen play a role in most of these stories. 

The passion behind the words and the declaiming rhythm of the sentences make me interested in reading Baldwin’s nonfiction. I think to really understand the rhythms of the sentences and the inspiration for the titles and imagery the reader would need a thorough grounding in the Bible and gospel music.