Knox Book Beat,
The Berkeley Times, September 2016
“Don’t touch, just f**k me,” Marisol commands
her pickup on page 61, as imperiously objectifying as Clint Eastwood’s Silent
Stranger in
Fistful of Dollars and his
Dirty Harry character saying, “make my day” as he blows The Scorpio Killer away.
With her I’m supposed to empathize? Reverse sexism? Commodification of fellow
humans? Return to the reptile brain? Yuk. I feel
bullied, and I don’t like it, by her approach and her early prose. Bullied,
seduced and abandoned. The intentional fallacy. Fed a line, a rip-off or a
spiked drink cause she thinks I’m a trick or a mark or a hoe. Guess if this is
not entirely appealing to me.
A
lot of good movies start badly like this, and I have to say that this is a good book
and pretty well written otherwise, but hand-held cameras bouncing along behind
the hero like in Suffragette make me
seasick, not “engaged.” I fought back when I got beaten up as a kid, Vietnamese gonorrhea from a
one-night stand, had more lovers than I can count on all my fingers and toes,
and my fourth-grader greeted me with “Wuzzup me homie M-thug?” after school 20
years ago, so it’s not like I’m from outer space on these things; but turning
it around by ignoring or stereotyping White women donors, (lesbians White Jody
and Asian Kim to some extent) and clinic volunteers; White, Latino and Black
men and the token older Jewish counselor Holocaust survivor left me cool.
I
put a cover with a picture of Rep. Barbara Lee over the lurid “rip my dress off”
front and a Berkeley Times schoolgirl-of-color saying “never give up trying to
save the world” on the back of Uptown
Thief by Aya de León so I could stand to carry it around. Even as an old,
White, suburban-raised, Civil Rights-marching hippie “Sexual Revolution”
survivor with a book called Warring and
Whoring to my name; I couldn’t wrap my head around why a smart,
socially-aware, Cal-employed creative writing teacher of color would write a
titillating “high-voltage action” and generally improbable tale glorifying the
“heist-fiction genre.”
By putting
adrenaline, obsessive greed, spontaneous violence, condoms, vengeance, tech and
deadly weapons into women’s hands; do she, her publisher and potential readers
assume it’s “feminist” by some wave of an “invincible” stiletto heel? “Equal
rights for women?” Am I the “target market” for Uptown Thief?
Yes, I get it: we get that way defending
ourselves against the “culture,” but buying and reading books that “feel bad”
“because (somebody else thinks) they’re good for me” is the same (masochistic?)
game, sabé? It’s very good pulp action-erotic fiction, but I’m not convinced it’s feminist just because it’s grittily set between a sex workers’
women’s health clinic, her “escort service” she’s using to fund it and corrupt,
disgusting male cops, pimps, drunks, rappers, thugs and CEOs.
 |
| Aya de Leon from her website. |
Things
went past fast-and-furious, crisis-to-crisis, half X-(wo)men and half Jametta
Bond, until page 161-5 where we get a tiny peek into Marisol’s psyche after a
flashback or two. The cast of characters opens up by her hero’s trip to Cuba
towards the end, where we get some alternatives to The American Lifestyle of
Color she’s supposedly living in New York, but I can’t believe she won’t let us
in on, for example, what Marisol and the sister she gave up everything for she
hasn’t seen for 10 years have to say when they’re alone together well past the
300th page. They have an honest argument 30 pages later; but when
there’s no attorney at the NYPD interrogation, interpersonal “choreography”
takes a couple of readings to visualize, characters’ personalities and actions
contradict themselves abruptly to no clear purpose here and there; I’m looking
for a “continuity” editor and drift off from “the flow.”
I
wanted to step in in a bigger-than-Sandberg
way. Meet complex real people. Like the sex finally “takes
hold” with Marisol by p. 269 or so: go from fakey-mean excited and over stimulated to
real-mammal moved. Call me a romantic;
but I want a Dickens, Colette, Lessing or Dostoyevsky pulling me with a picture, a woven experience of how (internally?) military-industrial patriarchy can
be changed, not some quickie commercial
product that’ll keep me drugged, plugged or anesthetized in a shadow play full
of shouts and flashing figures that looks tawdry in the light of the next day.
Will
I get my tires slashed for writing this review? I don’t know. I doubt it. That’s
an assumption about what Gen X Black Latinas and their publishers might do. Am
I racist, sexist and ageist? Of course I am. Just look at the election: we all are in the good ol’ USA. But I have
to tell my real story, and I think de León will too, very soon, if she isn’t
already in some other genre or venue. Brava!
Gets better as it goes along. Maybe this is just a “way bad” pot-boiler
so she can write other stuff down the road. I back her in doing so, all the way
to Our New World.
P.S.
Her dialogue is excellent. “Adjectivally deprived,” (the f-words get boring in
parts), but very, very cadenced and realistic in almost all cases once they get
out of heist-planning mode and into more nuanced scenes. Same for the
sex/erotica. I wasn’t put off by the Spanish at
all, although I kept a list to look up later like the nautical terms in
O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin tales.
 |
| The Sequel! |
De
León, Aya, Uptown Thief, Dafina
Books, Kensington Publishing Corp., New York, NY, 2016.
--- 30 ---
[Addenda on intentional fallacy] …“External
(or private) evidence
What is not literally contained
in the work itself is external to that work, including all private or public
statements that the artist has made about the work of art, whether in
conversations, letters, journals, or other sources. Evidence of this type is directly
concerned with what the artist may have intended to do even or especially when
it is not apparent from the work itself. Analyzing a work of art based on
external evidence will likely result in the
intentional fallacy (my italics wc).
Thus,
a text's internal evidence — the words themselves and their meanings — is open
for literary analysis. External evidence — anything not contained within the
text itself, such as statements made by the poet about the poem that is being
interpreted — does not belong to literary criticism. Preoccupation with the
authorial intent "leads away from the poem." According to Wimsatt and
Beardsley, a poem does not belong to its author but rather "is detached
from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend
about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public."
Wikipedia,
the Free Encyclopedia (last mod 24 June 2016) “Authorial Intent” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent (18 August 2016)
