Asphalt: A Novel - Hardcover

Rux, Carl Hancock

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743474007 ISBN 13: 9780743474009

Publisher: Atria, 2004

Synopsis

Returning to his run-down New York brownstone after a career disappointment in Paris, musician Racine finds companionship and shares a sense of loss with a flamboyant ladies' man and a second-generation dancer. A first novel. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Hancock Rux is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, and performance and recording artist. He is the author of the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry and prose Pagan Operetta, and the Obie award-winning play Talk. His fiction, poetry, essays, articles, and plays have been widely anthologized in the U.S. and abroad. Mr. Rux is also a New York City Foster Care alumnus and now lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

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.
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Racine, a young man of sparse words and hidden emotions, returns from Paris to an unnamed community in New York that has long been neglected but is now on the radar of developers. Racine is invited to join a group of squatters living in a decaying brownstone; they have created a family of sorts and cobbled together an enterprise--a bootleg party venue--that provides them with meager financial support. Racine is the gifted DJ with a deep sense of how music moves people. Bartender Couchette is a beautiful dancer whose jazz-musician father committed suicide. Manny, who dresses in sarongs but attracts women, is the overseer. Haunted by their pasts, these vulnerable characters live in an atmosphere of ominous despair, with the imminent threat of eviction and demolition and occasional patrols of police and M-16s, in a neighborhood disconnected from the more affluent parts of the city by a bridge raised as part of an urban warfare strategy. Rux's lyrical writing blurs the lines between dreamscape and reality. A dazzling portrait of urban life. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743474007
• ISBN 13: 9780743474009
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272