Monday's Reviews Today: LaValle's Latest & Sublette's NOLA
-- Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2009 2:17:00 PM
In Victor LaValle's new novel, Big Machine, a former addict delivering a note given to him stumbles upon a bizarre subculture known as the “Unlikely Scholars,” a groups of black former addicts and petty thieves who live in a remote Vermont locale and read voraciously about the supernatural. With this book, the critically acclaimed LaValle "is sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe." And in Ned Sublette's The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans, the New York musician goes back to New Orleans, his hometown, offering a pre-Katrina take on the place, from a visit in 2004-2005, "in this blunt, eloquently humane and musically astute memoir."
Big MachineVictor LaValle. Spiegel & Grau, $25 (376p) ISBN 978-0-385-53041-5
LaValle’s critical acclaim for his previous works (a collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and novel, The Ecstatic) and his second novel is sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe. Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice takes a chance on an anonymous note delivered to him at the cruddy upstate New York bus depot where he works as a porter. Quickly, Ricky finds himself among the “Unlikely Scholars,” a secret society of ex-addicts and petty criminals, all black like him, living in remote Vermont and sifting through stacks of articles in a library devoted to investigating the supernatural; the existence of a god; and the legacy of Judah Washburn, an escaped slave who claimed to have had contact with a higher being that the Unlikely Scholars now call “the Voice.” Ricky’s intoxicating voice—robust, organic, wily—is perfect for narrating LaValle’s high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as the fateful porter—something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of “spiritual X-men”—wanders through America’s “messianic hoo-hah.” (Aug.)
The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New OrleansNed Sublette. Lawrence Hill, $27.95 (464p) ISBN 978-1-55652-824-8
Musician, musicologist and longtime New York resident, Sublette revisits his Southern roots and recounts a 2004–2005 pre-Katrina research sojourn in New Orleans in this blunt, eloquently humane and musically astute memoir—a worthy companion to his acclaimed The World That Made New Orleans, a music-laden cultural history of the city to 1819. Sublette delves into some quintessential dynamics of modern American popular culture—including endemic racism and poverty as well as restive imagination and invention—through the prism of his childhood in virulently segregated, early rock ’n’ rolling Natchitoches, La., and the fraught but idiosyncratic culture he finds in pre-flood New Orleans. If discussions of Elvis, early rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop millionaires straight out of New Orleans’ projects inevitably rehearse familiar narratives, Sublette carefully marks them out as part of a larger personal and social landscape. Sublette’s sensitivity to the precariousness of a system that collapsed completely after he returned to New York is more than mere hindsight; his worldview dovetails movingly with his turbulent and alluring subject and its dogged rebirth. (Sept.)
