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Thumper
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2003 - 06:11 pm: | 
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Hello All,
I just started More Like Wrestling by Danyel Smith. I'm really liking it so far. I began thinking as I was reading the third chapter, I would really like to read a book from the point of view from the fool of a woman who would choose a man over her children. If you all know of one, hit me back. |
Casey
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, July 10, 2003 - 12:54 am: |
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Thumper, I read the book More Like Wrestling by Danyel Smith several months back, and although I did finish reading the book, one thing that I found amazing too was the fact that the mother chose a man over her children. I mean this woman married the guy and put the "kids"(Kids were teenagers) up in an apartment! I guess that when I read that part of the book the rest of the story was pretty much unbelievable to me and all the problems those kids ran into growing up and as adults was to me a result of them growing up as adolescents without parental supervision in the home! Interestingly enough though a white coworker mentioned that her mother remarried and placed her and siblings in an apartment while mom and new hubby lived in the house-again unbelievable to me. I guess this does happen in true life, but I concur with you that any woman who chooses a man over her children is a fool! Just my 0.05 |
Thumper
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 13, 2003 - 05:39 pm: |
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Hello All,
I just finished More Like Wrestling. Although, it has some good spots, I still have a few issues with it as I hinted in another post. Mainly, I didn't like the structure of the novel, nor how Smith would switch time and place on a dime. The characters voices weren't that strongly developed for that maneuver at all. Overall, I would have to say that the good didn't outweigh the bad. |
steve
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, July 14, 2003 - 06:28 pm: |
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The mother not only rents her twelve- and fourteen-year-old daughters their own apartment (to get them away from her abusive boyfriend), she refuses to tell them about their real father, even after they've grown up, suffered miscarriages, and seen their friends murdered. L is for the way you look at me.
I read it to the very end because I felt guilty about mentioning Stanley Crouch's positive review. I'd call it a Gatsby-like tale of the rise and fall of a drug clique in Oakland in the eighties. The author creates interest in the characters during the first fifty pages, however, once she gets into describing the crack dealer's lifestyle and its bourgeois decadence -- the Gap Kids, Beemers, the ferry out to Sausalito for brunch to kick back with some mango margaritas, the chic clothing, drinks at the Claremont Hotel, etc. -- it just goes on, and on, and on. I kept thinking that as a cautionary tale, this is really soft-pedalling it.
The author humanizes this group of crack dealers -- Maynard, Oscar, and Cedric are all college jocks who drop out at the same time as Paige; they're joined by childhood friends Todd and Donnell. The women become Stepford crack wives, enjoying the affluence but shielded from reality until the murders begin (at about p. 180, as I recall). Oscar and Cedric remain good guys throughout. Maynard jeckylls-out early when a character flaw of Todd's (which causes him to go upside his wife's particular head with a car jack), brings out a character flaw of Maynard's own. At the end of all this trouble, Paige envisions having married elementary school friend Obe instead of Oscar and living the life of some sort of fishwife on a salt marsh somewhere (which lasts for about five seconds).
I personally would rather read about characters more like the author herself -- a writer for example, or the kind of independent characters which appear in ZZ Packer's stories -- rather than these social creature, party animals, or whatever. Maybe that's being too judgemental. The portrayal of sisterhood was good and the epilogue alone is proof that this author can really write.
I read a good essay collection by another Oakland resident -- Ishmael Reed's "Another Day at the Front." |
Thumper
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, July 14, 2003 - 08:25 pm: |
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Hello Steve,
Ah man, you ain't gotta feel guilty about mentioning the positive Stanley Crouch review. Yes, Smith can definitely write! I would have preferred that she had made this one a novella or a short story than what it eventually evolved into. I wasn't a fan of the tangents she went off into. For instance, was it really necessary that I know how Jessie's parents met? *eyebrow raised* Nope. I also didn't like Paige's and Pinch's mother keeping their father's identity secret. What was the point of that?? This is the second book that I read, the first being Gwynne Forester's Blues From Down Deep, that kept secrets from itself. It's right stupid.
Let me ask you a question: were you always aware of Paige and Pinch switching the narrator role? I wasn't. It went right over my head. |
steve
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 11:30 pm: |
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Hello Thumper,
Thanks  Interesting, but towards the end of the novel, didn't Pinch become an omniscient narrator? -- if that's the right term -- in other words, she wasn't physically there but she was describing the action. That was unusual. Overall, there seemed to be more narration by Pinch than Paige, but I'm not certain about that. It ends with Pinch's letter written aboard a flight to Milan, Italy. Where'd that come from?
Jess's father was a very interesting character. In my mind's eye I guess I pictured him as Arthur Logan, the physician/civil rights organizer in Duke Ellington's inner circle. I've already forgotten how he and his wife met, but I'll remember the particulars if I think about it long enough. Jess's remarks about her father seemed way out of line to me.
I actually liked the tangents into Oakland history and thought there should have been more. I also thought that the novel might have been more interesting if the characters had spoken some of those italicized thoughts instead of holding them back. It would have shaken thing up at least! As a wife, Paige was suffering the after effects of her abusive childhood home. I thought the author could have expanded the journal entries to good effect. I like novels where characters are writers, artists, or musicians. I don't think there was a single mention of music (probably a blessing in disguise) which was unusual for a nostalgic novel. It's interesting that you're thinking seems to go in the opposite direction -- of condensing it into a novella. I hadn't thought of that. It was a very long read for me.
It doesn't seem like the kind of book Stanley Crouch would like, does it? The author has a pride of place in the city where she grew up which I sure don't have about my hometown. I've been to Oakland but I don't know Funktown from Funkytown or the Rusty Scupper from Carlos O'Rourke's. I also don't feel the loyalty to any group of friends that she obviously does. She's writing about a world she knows and the characters are probably based on people she's known. Her insights into people and human nature were great but there was more conspicuous consumption in this novel than Emperor of Ocean Park. I guess that's part of the Gatsby aspect though, he was a character similar to Oscar in a way. It will be interesting to see what she'll do next, now that she's written the story that had to be told. |
steve
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2003 - 07:12 pm: |
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I've thought about the novel for a week. Like Invisible Man and John Henry Days, I think More Like Wrestling is primarily an allegory. On p. 4, Paige asks her mother, "What's a symbol?" The mother collects pineapple figurines which symbolize welcome, but her younger daughter Pinch collects African Americana, which, like Brother Tarp's chain link in Invisible Man and Pamela Street's father's John Henry memorabilia in JHD, is a reminder of the courage of her ancestors and a sense of pride in her people and culture. When she receives the figurine and certificate from Oscar and her sister on her birthday (her first grown-up gift), her reaction, "daaaang," has a heartbreaking ring to it after she trips, shatters it, and is ridiculed by her friend 'Rell.
Tee is blinded in an attack by her husband Todd and she wears a glass eye. This is probably signifying on Invisible Man's Jack of the Brotherhood who also wears a glass eye. Tee's emotional blindness had previously caused her to ignore Todd's behavior in the back seat with Pinch. The question is, does her blindness cause others to see more clearly?
Todd is knocked to the pavement by the insurance man, which seems to be another reference to Invisible Man -- the scene in which Tod Clifton committs "suicide by police" after selling his dancing dolls on the sidewalk. I don't really understand what the author is trying to say here. Oscar has been arguing bitterly with Todd when the insurance man comes out and cuts Todd's feet out from under him. Oscar gives Todd a hand up and yells something like, "Where's the love, Mr. Black Business owner? Aren't you supposed to be passing down wisdom?" to which the man replies, "I got your wisdom"! I don't get it. The only symbolic importance the insurance man has that I can see, is that he's anti-gun. This is in contrast to Jess's dentist father, a white man, who provides the gun which accidentally kills his daughter. There's an anti-gun message here. But the worst advice in the novel (and the author is not endorsing it either) comes from Todd when he says that Tee "needs to be with the man who made her like she is [blind] -- no one else can tell her sorry enough times -- she'll get her pride back and take off those glasses"(!) Yeah, and put on those blinders!
Desire is akin to being hit by a streetcar, but when Pinch is nearly run over by the AC Transit (Alameda Contra-Costa) No. 40 line, it's not desire that's doing it. In addition, Cedric's (the young man who is murdered) father is a busdriver on the No. 40; Pinch takes it enroute to Paige and Oscar's even when it takes her out of the way; and finally, on p. 262, Pinch thinks, "The No. 40 pulled on down . . . But I wasn't on it. I'm going in another direction." What does the bus symbolize?
In James Alan McPherson's short story, "Of Cabbages and Kings" (Hue and Cry), "The Brotherhood" refers to The Nation of Islam; in Invisible Man, The Brotherhood is the Communist Party; and in More Like Wrestling's brief history of Oakland it has two meanings: first it's The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and a few pages later, The Black Panthers: "In the street by Mexicali Rose . . . by where the Brotherhood got started." The absence of the Panthers is noted, esp. in relation to Seth, but, in comparison to a novel like Invisible Man, is there a void of leadership in MLW (with the obvious exceptions of Oscar's father and possibly some of the relatives like Gram Liz?
The title is from Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: "The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, insofar as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforseen, and is not apt to fall" (p. 191-2) But isn't there a connection between wrestling and boxing, specifically, the "battle royal" (the struggle for survival, brother vs. brother) in Invisible Man? In Ellison's prologue, invisibility is likened to a boxer using his invisibility in society to slip punches by getting inside his opponent's sense of time -- but aside from the personal relationships, isn't More Like Wrestling a battle royal? In regard to Maynard and Todd, does the phrase "shooting oneself in someone else's foot" have some meaning?
The sisters have an apartment, the "Pseudo," on the edge of "Funktown," right off the lake ("Merritt"). They live in what Ralph Ellison's unnamed protagonist describes as a "border area," i.e., a symbolic area on the edge of the black community -- symbolic of crossroads: the intersection of standard and vernacular english; oral culture and Talmudic scholarship; religious, gender, ethnic, and other "passing," etc. Ostensibly a "pseudo-Victorian" house (rented by a woman name Vangelista), does the Pseudo have a double meaning? -- "pseudointellectual" for instance -- and, if so, could it have been called the "Quasi"? for "Quasi-literati Manor" which could be rented by somebody called Quasimodo?
The Acorns ("the acorns are thick at night"), if I remember correctly, is described not as "the" projects, but "a" project. The Acorns are "the fruit of the oaks" (sweet fruit or bitter harvest?)
These are the obvious questions. I have other questions too. I noticed that Ishmael Reed has a little travel book coming out: "Blues City: A Walking Tour of Oakland." Thanks for reading this.
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Thumper
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2003 - 10:00 pm: |
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Hello Steve,
Man, you are a lot more preceptive than I am. I didn't see the relationship between More Like Wrestling and Invisible Man. Between me and you, if Smith was trying to get that deep with this book, it went over my head. I didn't see the correlation. But, after you made your points, I can see where you were coming from. The primary and most obvious difference between the two books is that Ellison masterfully layered his book with different perspectives and meanings making the story richer. That's not the case with More Like Wrestling. As you know, in my opinion, above all social commentaries, political agendas, etc, in a novel the story should ALWAYS come first. With Invisible Man, if one was to take all of the layers away and kept the basic storyline, the book would still be one hell of a read. If Smith was striving to emulate all the points of Invisible Man as you stated, she failed horribly because she had not laid the foundation (a good storyline) in which to make those jumps and leaps that Ellison made. |
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