Asphalt
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Already a celebrated performance artist, vocalist, poet, playwright, and visionary, Carl Hancock Rux now presents a brilliant debut novel--a profound and lyrical portrait of urban life that will take its place among the classics of American literature.
Racine is a reserved young man, but his passion for music lights him up inside. He's just returned from Paris where he'd been invited by a friend to produce music, make recordings, and earn a living. The plan didn't quite pan out, and now he's back in New York, where fate, providence, or just plain chance leads him to a once-glorious brownstone turned into a squat by a few eccentric loners.
There's Manny, who wears sarongs and glitter but has no trouble attracting beautiful women, and Couchette, a gorgeous second-generation dancer whose mother has gone to Bali to live and bear a child with a man who built her a house in the midst of a rice paddy. What binds the characters is a deep sense of loss. Each is--like the city they live in--wounded and seeking healing and connection with and through the other housemates.
Rux's poetic fiction blurs the lines between characters' dreams, memory, and reality. Asphalt--the name representing the essence of the city and the hard, layered, yet vulnerable sensibility of its inhabitants--is part post-modern parable, part urban mythology, and altogether relevant to contemporary reality. Asphalt is daring and unforgettable, marking the arrival of an original and astounding new voice in American literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The return of a club disc jockey to his Brooklyn roots (and a near-future, postapocalyptic New York) sets the scene for this elegiac, moody set piece by playwright and musician Rux. Back from a stint in Paris, reticent Racine finds himself drawn to a dilapidated brownstone filled with eccentric squatters. Dying "Holy Mother" Lucinda and her doting caregiver, Mawepi, let him crash while Manny, a sequin-wearing druggie, and Couchette, a sexy exotic dancer, make him feel welcome. Racine gets busy "spinnin' " at Alibi, the illegal nightclub in the basement, and ends up romancing Couchette, whose mother has absconded to Bali and whose father killed himself in that very brownstone. Everyone is emotionally scarred, but the music they dance to and play (from U.K. trance to rock, blues to jazz) binds them together in a dizzying kaleidoscope of visions and images. Essentially plotless, the novel intersperses surrealistic segments about Racine's turbulent childhood (including a battle with orchitus he loses his testicles and mental health problems) that may or may not contain the key to his current manic state. An enormous rave party is planned in an anchorage space, and as Racine, Manny and Couchette arrive, a much-prophesied tragedy spells doom for the attendees. As a shocked Racine recounts his time producing music in Paris with childhood friend Phillipe, more confusion and disappointment settle over the narrative. Lyrically drawn though sometimes muddled escapist fare for the artsy set, this is an elegantly gloomy addition to Rux's artistic achievements.
