The Hanged Man
Francesca Lia Block
Technicolor descriptions, fizzy juxtapositions and a bouncy, upbeat undertone helped make Francesca Lia Block's first series of four young adult novels—from Weetzie Bat in 1989 to last year's Missing Angel...Juan—both irresistible and invaluable to adolescent readers.
Irresistible because her funky characters—rockers, artists, shamans and skateboarders—spoke in a wigged-out original argot that was part Valley Girl, part comic book, but at the same time, altogether fresh. What Block managed to do with her wacky wordplay was to create a private mental space for young readers; a country where the language felt like teenage secret code, a land with borderlines drawn in Clearisil. As with so many pop music lyrics and catchphrases of teen street slang, the apparent indecipherability of Block's poesy to anyone but the hippest of hip kids lent her books a magnetic allure.
After splashing into Block's effervescent brews, however, kids found that the stories were not all soda pop, but bittersweet, panging concoctions in which the young characters had to deal with major adolescent crises. Block's un-canned and un-preachy takes on teen pregnancy, sexual identity, broken families, drug use and abuse and other topics are what made these books invaluable. Block's overall hopeful and positive outlook did not lead her to ignore or sugar-coat the hard realities of modern teenage life.
Granted, Block's spins on these realities are not for everyone. You won't find excerpts from Cherokee Bat and The Goat Guys in William Bennett's Book of Virtues. But for left-leaning parents and counselors, the sensitive, kid-friendly presentation of issues in Block's first four books was a godsend.
Block's new novel, The Hanged Man, is not nearly as effective as her past work in its presentation of topical social issues. Like it or not, an awful lot of young teens have seen enough Oprah shows and cheeseball TV movies to know from early on in this brief book that the narrator, 17-year-old Laurel, is heading toward the shattering self-revelation that she is a victim of incest at the hands of her father.
The father, who dies of cancer in the book's opening passages, is kept alive in Laurel's mind by a surreal imaginary character named Jack, a pale, "junky-thin" wraith whose hello "cracks like ice when you pour the liquor over." Summoning up Laurel's terribly mixed feelings of sexual desire and shame, Jack reappears at crucial junctures throughout the story until he dissappears for good, whispering from inside Laurel's head "Let go of it, let go" as she falls into a forgiving embrace with her mother.
Images of smashing china, bones, blood and the symbols from a deck of tarot cards wend their way through the text with a totemic power that is never spelled out as neatly and cleanly as the main plot line. Block is economically eerie, wasting no words and making every sentence pack a punch in creating The Hanged Man's unsettling L.A. Anne Rice would do well to take a look at this work.
For all the disappointing predictability of its outcome, The Hanged Man ought not be ignored. In its language, its acute observation of modern families and its portrayal of Laurel as a psychologically complex, very real character, the book represents a significant step forward in Block's writing career.
A mature film noir in relation to Block's previous giddy kid flicks, The Hanged Man creates and sustains a dark, brooding atmosphere that ultimately seems more substantial than the candy-colored canvas of her earlier work. You could gobble up Block's first four books like snacks, but The Hanged Man offers nuances for a more sophisticated palate.
We ought to start regarding Block as more than a "Young Adult author." In The Hanged Man, her impulse to work things out by book's end seems at odds with the allusive and elusive poetry of her language, a vestige of writing for a troubled teen audience that desperately needs to get clear signals in life. In the past, Block has served that audience brilliantly. Now it seems time to move on.
