Fabulous Hell
Ben Neihart
and
Ratz are Nice (PSP)
Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite
Craig Curtis' Fabulous Hell and Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite's Ratz Are Nice (PSP), two new books published by Alyson, both carry the cover line "A Novel," but strike the reader less as fluent narratives than as blazing series of flashbulb pops, at times dazzling and at other times irritating.
First novelist Curtis' book, chronicling several months in the L.A. life of Coif, an HIV-positive party boy with little direction in life, is the more accessible of the two, in part due to the familiar (at times slightly too familiar) voice of the narrator. He's flip, he's jaded, he's oversteeped in pop culture, and he's just a little more despondent—and a little more romantic—than he'd like to admit. As you flip through these pages, you can hear what the characters in Ethan Mordden's Buddies series might sound like if they were significantly less highbrow, somewhat less intelligent and way more into substance abuse.
Fabulous Hell benefits significantly from Curtis' decision to deliver quick, cross-cut 2-3 page vignettes that usually jump the narrative forward but, particularly in the first quarter of the book, deliver crystalline flashbacks of the narrator's dysfunctional childhood. Had these memories of an abusive father and a distant mother been played out in a continuous stretch of backstory, they might have seemed trite, but flecked into the narrator's present-tense desperation like shards of broken glass, they make the past's cutting permanence have a real impact on the reader.
The format also holds Curtis' keenly observed, but undeniably mundane details of '70s childhood—"we finally get our first 19" color set from Sears," "I pray that morning will come and that Darrin and Samantha Stevens will be my Mom and Dad"—to just the right dosages where they can feel haunting rather than boring.
Humor—sometimes dizzily arcane in its media minutiae—is also a Curtis strong suit. There's a terrific bit in which Coif has to dress up and play Easter Bunny to a horde of rich toddlers as part of a luxury hotel job, and an indelible bit of dialogue features confusion over a reference to "The Landers Sisters":
"Ann Landers and Dear Abby?"
"Actually, I meant Judy and Audrey."
There should be a special literary prize for references that obscure.
Between flashes of witty trivia and a flashy structure, Fabulous Hell does a good job of distracting you from its deep-seated lack of much new to say: The distant mother remains distant, the alleged friends are drunk and drugged, and the prospective romances become imminent disasters. Curtis is smart enough not to fluff up a happy ending, yet, when, on the final page, Coif seems unenlightened and poised for the same disasters he was poised for on page one, readers may find themselves wishing for a bit less fabulousness and a bit more storytelling substance. Nonetheless, this is a debut with promising verve.
If Fabulous Hell suffers a bit from it's story's familiarity, Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is almost completely hobbled by its utter strangeness. Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite drops his readers into what for most of them will be foreign territory—the multi-ethnic, pansexual, hardcore punk street culture of Vancouver, British Columbia—without a navigation system. There's an extensive glossary with some helpful passages on the characters' social history, street colloquialism, and musical styles at the end of the book, but its too little, too late (The PSP of the novel's title turns out to stand for Pure Street Punk. It isn't even included in the glossary. I learned the meaning weeks after reading the book an interview with the author).
Ratz is riddled with intentional mispellings that push the reader away from the text at the same time Brathwaite seems to want to be pulling him into the heart of a subculture. Devices such as consistently using Z's in lieu of hard S's (boyz, wuz, thoze, guyz) and writing "No 1" instead of "no one" hinder reader access, rather than facilitating it. These annoying techniques don't suggest different pronunciations of words. They don't seem to do much at all except call attention to their affectedness. Sometimes Ratz feels like reading the lyric sheet of a Prince album.
On the bright side, Brathwaite excels at creating ferocious scenes of violence, and his writing moves with the energy of punk music (including the rather silly inclusion of occasional beat marks— // —in case the reader doesn't catch the rhythm). The book's gay content is relatively minimal, and really more homosexual than 'gay'-proper, because sex of any sort is just part of the survival game on Braithwaite's mean streets. His characters—difficult to distinguish from one another—are struggling for basic human identities at a level lower than sexual identity.
In all fairness to Braithwaite, whose first book, Wigger, was published by the seemingly more appropriate Arsenal Pulp Press, there is undoubtedly a small subculture of readers with enough preexisting insight into the milieu he writes of to appreciate Ratz significantly more than the average reader. But while Alyson's gutsy decision to publish Ratz will certainly expose Braithwaite to a wider audience than he's ever had before, its unlikely than he'll be able to win over many new fans until he makes some compromises in his extraordinarily inaccessible prose:
"They say Blk absorbz all light. Sparker sayz, he drawz him and Killer in hiz mind. So it'z filled wid them all. It's better than television or moviez. Wot'z Sparker'z subjet: Killeer//ras enuff to be on that tree of life of his n hiz familiez', buddiez absorb'n light."
Thatz not light reading//for one paragraph, let alone 200 pages.
