Slapboxing with Jesus: Amazon.ca: Victor LaValle: Books

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From Amazon.com

Victor D. LaValle grew up in Queens, New York, an African American male in a city and a country where guys who look like him are made to feel like interlopers. His debut collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, is hard-edged, violent, poetic. As in Junot Diaz's Drown, the prose is a series of choppy, precise sentences, like jabs ("The NYU banners flapped with the wind, loud enough to sound like teeth cracking in your head"), and the stories take place in small stuffy apartments where walls are inadequate shields against the loud and inescapable neighborhood.

Like Diaz, LaValle is pretty merciless when it comes to the subject of women. As the title suggests, this is a macho book. The opening sentence of the first story begins, "The next morning I was still scratching my nuts." Readers without nuts might be a little put off. The love that occurs in these pages is between brothers, between guys who have known each other since they were kids and who have tried to bail each other out, set each other up, find a whore they can both share. In the powerful three-page story "Chuckie," even boyhood bonds break apart in the face of a violent Italian gang. When the title character is beat up, the narrator realizes that he can only protect himself: "The blood started coming. I didn't know a face had so much. Helping was still an option for the others, but not me..."

The highlight of the book is "Ghost Story." Like Denis Johnson's famous "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," it renders paranoid delusions from the first person--and bit by bit the prose collapses as the narrator's medication wears off. Here he recalls a stint in a mental hospital:

Just the hours that were eons sitting on a couch, a row of ten of you, ten or twenty, no books, magazines too simple for the mildly retarded and your active mind leaps further and further over an empty cosmos, as lonely as the satellites sent to find life in the universe. But in there, at least, was when I'd realized how they waged their war, my enemies: through sockets and plugs, through a current.

Such passages establish LaValle as a writer to be reckoned with, one capable of transporting the reader to a strange and terrible interior. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

"These days, the most revolutionary thing you can be is articulate," a teacher tells one of the characters in LaValle's debut collection, whichAby that standardAis more than revolutionary: it's radiant. These 12 stories mostly concern boysAblack, white, Latino, AsianAcoming of age in Queens during the 1980s, and their strategies for surviving street life on the one hand and, just as harrowing, adolescence on the other. All bluster on the surface, LaValle's characters are disarmingly vulnerable underneath, and this book is as warm and funny as it is tough. The one thing these hard-shelled boys from the hood crave most is to be held tenderly. Unfortunately, they get in their own way more often than not. In "raw daddy," Sean spends his days dreaming of ways to save humanity, but can't resist cheating on his girlfriend. In "getting ugly," the "big eyes and funny skin" narrator won't admit he's falling in love with beautiful Deidre; even as he watches a sentimental sunset with her, he insists he's just "out for ass." And in "class trip," 15-year-old Anthony makes arrangements with his friends to visit a crackhead prostitute behind his girlfriend's back. When they're not dreaming of love, LaValle's characters are dreaming of escape: Ahab joins the Marines, his best friend Horse moves to the suburbs and Anthony plots to get into trouble so he'll be sent to an aunt in Trinidad as punishment. The stories are stunningly craftedAespecially the last seven, which all feature AnthonyAand the writing is sharp and jazzy: parakeets are "not quite green... only half ripe"; goats have the faces of "Evil Professors"; and memories come "as easy as a cookie with your tea." If LaValle's characters make tragic, disastrous choices at times, they are nevertheless redeemed through the power of their narratives. "Minor Herodotus I will be, in remembering it all," LaValle writes; "our lives, to me, are important artifacts." This is an impressive, accomplished debut. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Oct.) FYI: LaValle has been chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers program.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

33 Reviews

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
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4.5 out of 5 stars (33 customer reviews)

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2.0 out of 5 stars NOT A GOOD TEACHER, Mar 29 2003

By

Sesho "www.sesho.libsyn.com" (Pasadena, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slapboxing with Jesus (Paperback)

Books written about the street aren't necessarily good. Some people believe that if you show enough realism and grittiness, in essence, show the street as it truly is, art will result. They're wrong, as is evidenced by this generic collection of stories about young boys sexing it up, fighting, pimping, killing, and basically living like animals. There's something really creepy and unsettling about the subject matter that Lavalle has chosen.

I must tell you from the outset that I do not believe in collections of stories that have thin connections between each other, mostly when it's through the characters. To me, they are written by writers without enough vision to craft a novel. They write a lot of stories and then they concoct that they go together. The same goes for this book.

All of the stories have to do with young men or boy-children. The first couple of stories work the best because the novelty of the subject and setting hasn't got old yet. In "ancient history" two friends vie to become successful. "pops" concerns the first meeting between a boy and his cop father, with all the ensuing awkwardness. "kids on colden street" shows a boy who gets a kid sister and becomes her protector. In the end he realizes he can protect her from nothing.

While I thought the stories in this book were adequate, there was something too craftsmanlike about them. None of the characters were really established enough to care about them through the whole volume. While it had spats of good writing, it was mostly just average.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Short stories collection, Nov 7 2001

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"July Lady" (MS United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slapboxing with Jesus (Paperback)

These are a collection of stories of guys growing up on the street of New York. The stories deal with relationship, missing fathers, prostitution, teasing, and other things teens go through. The stories make you think. I throught some of the stories ended kinda of strange, but they were still good.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Short stories collection, Nov 7 2001

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"July Lady" (MS United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slapboxing with Jesus (Paperback)

These are a collection of stories of guys growing up on the street of New York. The stories deal with relationship, missing fathers, prostitution, teasing, and other things teens go through. The stories make you think. I throught some of the stories ended kinda of strange, but they were still good.

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Short stories collection
These are a collection of stories of guys growing up on the street of New York. The stories deal with relationship, missing fathers, prostitution, teasing, and other things teens... Read more

Published on Nov 7 2001 by "July Lady"

4.0 out of 5 stars Stick and Jab, Stick and Jab
This was an extremely well-written collection of interconnected vignettes. The author's language and style really jump in your face and nearly knock you out (yeah, bad pun, I... Read more

Published on Oct 14 2001 by B!