Pink Smog: Becoming Weetzie Bat [Hardcover]

This prequel to the Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books series of the 1990s does something interesting. It starts off like a clichéd YA novel and then veers sharply into the magical - the arc of the artist.

This story, unlike the later novels, is told in the first person. Louise is an unhappy 13-year-old outcast with no friends. As the novel begins, her parents have just separated. Louise adores her father Charlie, but he's finally left L.A. for his own dream city, New York. Louise's mother is a mess, devastated by the separation, neglecting herself and Louise, and drinking herself into self-indulgent oblivion.

At school, the teachers have rather jarring "tag" names like Miss Spinner and Mr. Adolph, and besides being picked on by mean girls, Louise is humiliated by Miss Spinner in front of the class for "overwriting" in the dramatic, poetic style that will later make Francesca Lia Block so beloved. So far it's just a litany of middle school suffering.

A few strange things happen - not the least of which is Louise's new friendships with two fellow outcasts - but when Louise spontaneously breaks into the apartment of a suspicious neighbor, the tone shifts. Following the revelations from that gateway journey, the mythological characters multiply and coincidences flourish. While Louise still suffers the loss of the beloved father who expects her to stay and take care of her mother (which HE wouldn't do), Louise begins to develop and claim the Weetzie identity that will be her salvation.

Even in the first person, she frequently questions whether the fantastic incidents and archetypal people are real, or imaginary. Clearly, Louise is not psychotic; it's not that she doesn't know if something has actually happened to her. Instead, this is the true creation of Weetzie Bat. Weetzie, in collusion with her mentor-creator Francesca, will hereafter deliberately blur the strict separation between self-creation and historical veracity. They aren't crazy; they're artists. It's not that they can't tell, but they have made a vow that factuality isn't identity, that what's important is what you say about yourself. Bullied Louise has turned into punky, reckless, assured Weetzie, a myth of her own creating. The novel ends with the first chapter of Weetzie Bat, when the magic of poetry, fashion, and self-determination are already in full swing.

And now we know how she did it.

After two disastrously dull urban fantasies, Francesca Lia Block is dipping back into the series that first made her career.

But don't expect quite the same things from Weetzie Bat and Co. -- "Pink Smog" is a prequel, not a sequel. This slender novel tells the story of how an awkward teenage girl became the hipster Weetzie Bat, and the painful road that leads to one's own identity. The problem is that it spends too much time meandering in place rather than sending Weetzie forward.

Louise Bat doesn't want to be called "Louise"; she wants to be called Weetzie. She also wants a life completely different from her own -- her body is at the ugly-duckling stage, her school is full of bullies and mean girls, her mother is a reclusive alcoholic, and her dad has left them. And before long, Weetzie realizes that her father -- and her life -- have never been as wonderful as she thought.

At school, she makes friends with anorexic Lily and gay Bobby. Away from home, she follows a series of nursery-rhyme riddles. And at home, she simultaneously falls in love with the beautiful, mysterious boy named Winter (who may be an angel), and finds that he's under the malign influence of his insane sister Annabelle. The only way to break free of her old life is to find who she truly is...

As always, Francesca Lia Block's prose in "Pink Smog" is simply sublime, filled with hauntingly sensual descriptions ("It looked as though mermaids cut silver paths beneath the surface. There was a fat, mottled moon in the sky") and lots of glittering, colorful descriptions of Los Angeles. And she imbues Weetzie's coming-of-age with a painful awareness -- bullying, divorce, first love and first loss of that love.

However, that coming-of-age story still feels rather thin -- most of it is Weetzie eventually coming-to-terms with her "weirdness" and hanging out with her friends. In fact, we spend a lot more time wandering around aimlessly in the high school than we do with the mysterious riddles or the creepy siblings in Apartment 13. Every coming-of-age young-adult story has high-school woes, and they bog down the fascinating subplots (such as a beautiful mystery boy controlled via voodoo dolls by his witchy sister).

And while we spend the whole book in Weetzie's head, I never really understood her feelings and actions. She drifts around in a cloud of muted emotions and memories, making hipster clothes and thinking about Marilyn Monroe -- and when something shocking or upsetting happens, she comes across as mildly perturbed.

And her friends Lily and Bobby are never really explored very much, and are hand-waved away at the story's end. While this serves the underlying message of the story -- that if you are true to yourself, you are the only one you will ever need -- it feels a bit lazy.

"Pink Smog" is a beautifully written that shows the flowering of Weetzie Bat, but Francesca Lia Block seems uncomfortable with writing a book set in the character's high school years.

When Weetzie's father leaves her family, it feels like all the magic has gone out of her world. Now they live in a city apartment instead of a canyon cottage. Weetzie's mother only appears able to drink and cry. Weetzie can't seem to make any friends at her new school, and no one will call her by the right name. But when an angel saves her mother from drowning, all the love she felt for her father is transferred to her angel. Gradually --- following a trail of riddles left for her in silvery envelopes --- she begins to make new friends and becomes re-enchanted with the City of Angels that is her home.

PINK SMOG is Francesca Lia Block's prequel to her groundbreaking book, WEETZIE BAT. Published over 20 years ago, WEETZIE BAT changed the profile of young adult literature to include books that blended myth and fairy tale with contemporary pop culture and grim teen realities. Instead of treating teen problems as transgressions to be punished, Block's books have always offered a glimmer of hope for even the most troubled characters. Her novels don't just tolerate differences, but offer radical acceptance to people in all walks of life and focus on the healing power of love.

Weetzie at 13 is just beginning to show the glimmers of the iconic character she will become. Finding her signature style, she clumsily follows school trends until she starts making clothes of her own. Her hair is "mousette" instead of bleached blond. Her ability to transform the sights and sounds of everyday Los Angeles into "Shangri-L.A." has only just begun to develop. PINK SMOG is a portrait of Weetzie in her formative years and the events that would later shape the story for which she is known.

Fans of WEETZIE BAT will recognize elements of later books here. Weetzie's father, Charlie, is a filmmaker, shares the same profession and bears a physical resemblance to the love of Weetzie's life (Secret Agent Lover Man in the later books). Weetzie has already become involved with friends on the fringe, like Lily Chin, whose eating disorder barely disguises that she's starving for affection, or Bobby Castillo, whose good looks and humor can't protect him from the harsh realities of hustling on the streets. Weetzie can see the magic in them, despite their difficult situations and the persecution they all experience at the hands of mean girls at school.

Though Weetzie is limited by her 13 years of life experience, darker elements also lurk in PINK SMOG, as they do in most of Block's books. For those who have wondered how Weetzie came to be emancipated at such an early age, her mother's difficulty to pull herself out of a tailspin of depression and alcohol provide a portrait of a child desperately trying to cope with parents who are unable to care for her. Likewise, Weetzie's sinister neighbors, who she imagines to be her father's second family, raise questions about what is actually going on. Are they real people or figments of her vivid imagination that needs both villains and heroes to see her through a difficult time?

I first encountered WEETZIE BAT in college. It changed my mind about youth literature, which I had given up in junior high. Instead of dividing the good kids (prom dresses, boyfriends, best friends) from the bad kids (teen pregnancies, drug habits, terminal diseases), it featured characters that resembled people I knew. It's also notable that Block's books were some of the first I read that presented a fluid range of sexualities as a completely normal part of human life and not a problem to be solved.

To understand how remarkable this is, you have to realize that WEETZIE BAT was first published in 1989, well before the brutal beating of Matthew Shepherd brought to light the plight of many gay teens. But part of what made that crime so shocking is that, by 1998, it was far more normal to know someone who was out in high school. The recent "It Gets Better" campaign has made me wonder how much better it has actually gotten to be an openly gay teen in an American high school.

"Love is a dangerous angel," says Dirk in WEETZIE BAT, giving the series about Weetzie and her "almost-family" its name. As the book deals with (among other things) the then-much publicized problem of AIDS, this statement refers to the actual death sentence that worried much of youth culture at the time. But the message is still relevant, even if times have changed. Love is dangerous, it makes us vulnerable to loss, and Block's books, more than any others, have always captured what it's like to take a chance with loving a lost soul in the attempt to save your own.

A number of the friends I had from the "Weetzie" period of my life are now gone. Many of them, like brilliant meteors, didn't even last that long. Some vanished to addictions, bad relationships, or to the streets when they couldn't solve problems on their own. And I still have a habit of looking for missing faces among kids on the street, forgetting that if they survived, these people would no longer be young.

I suspect I'm not the only person to have this response to Francesca Lia Block's books, which makes PINK SMOG a challenge to place. Not only is it not WEETZIE BAT, for readers already familiar with the original, it can be a reminder of how we've aged or what we've lost. For those unfamiliar with WEETZIE BAT, they will miss many of the allusions that make this book great. Instead of viewing it as a prequel, perhaps it's best to see PINK SMOG as the sixth installment of the series.

But that doesn't seem fair to a book that easily stands on its own. Putting aside the strong personal feelings I have about Block and her books, PINK SMOG works as a coming-of-age story about a girl in 1970s Los Angeles. Written as a love song for a city that feeds off the hopes and dreams of the young, it's also an elegy to those who lived and lost there, and to many who died young. Weetzie's birthday, Block tells us, is on the same day that Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe died. Juxtaposing images of the voluptuous and vulnerable star, with an awkward and flat-chested teenager, Block makes a case for Weetzie to become a star of her own.

Reviewed by Sarah A. Wood