Tag Archives: Violence

The Epic of Dogtown

Don Winslow’s City on Fire has quotes from The Aeneid and The Iliad throughout. Those epics are about the siege of Troy, the original city on fire, so the quotes are apt. Winslow’s story is an epic as well, but his Troy is Providence, Rhode Island, the land of “I know a guy.” That’s an unexpected setting for an epic, but it works. Just substitute the ancient Greeks and Trojans for Italian and Irish mobsters in the 1980s. The Irish control the docks. The Italians control the trucks and almost everything else. The merchandise that falls off the boats and trucks supports both gangs and their respective rust belt neighborhoods. Each respects the other’s territory, meaning the Italians rarely venture into Dogtown, the name of the Irish section where slaughterhouses once attracted feral dogs.

A beautiful woman emerges from the sea on a hot summer day. Here’s our Helen, except her name is Pam, because it’s Providence. Danny Ryan knows immediately that she’s going to be trouble. “Women that beautiful usually are.” Just ask the Greeks and Trojans. Danny is in his late 20s, and his father-in-law runs the Irish gang. Danny is “faithful like a dog,” so he isn’t going to be the Paris in this story. That role is reserved for his brother-in-law, who steals Pam away from a high-ranking Italian mobster. Jokes are made at this mobster’s expense, and when “people start to disrespect you in one area of your life, it leaks into others.” The initial weapons are bats, but soon bullets fly and bodies fall. Danny moves up the chain of command. He’s never been tested like this before, and it’s going to take everything he has to get himself and his family out alive.

Mob stories make for great epics. They have all the requisites built in: violence, greed, lust, family, and loyalty. There’s just one problem. Our popular culture is rife with these stories, so it takes a talented writer to craft a captivating one that’s fresh. Fortunately, Winslow is such a writer.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor.

Down by the River: Not your Great-Granny’s Ireland

Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River opens ominously with a road in a verdant and decaying rural Ireland. “The road is silent, somnolent yet with a speech of its own, speaking back to them, father and child, through trappings of sun and fretted verdure, speaking of old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood.” Hey, wait one hot second, Gladiola! Yes, dear reader. This is all wrong. My great-grandmother was born in Ireland, and I went there last year on a golf trip. Where are the wee folk and the pints of Guinness? The songs about unicorns? My apologies, dear reader, but this is a story by Edna O’Brien. She’s Ireland’s William Faulkner. Or, perhaps better put, William Faulkner is America’s Edna O’Brien. She writes about Ireland in all its melancholy and sordidness, so fear and superstition appear on every page – song too, but no wee folk; no unicorns.

Mary (that’s a loaded name in a predominantly Catholic country) is 14 years old. Her father is James. He loves horses, but he’s a cruel man who believes in “might before right.” He’s been raping Mary for quite some time now, and she is desperate to get away from him. She and her sister, Elizabeth (another loaded name), visit a remote shrine and pray for their father to be cured of his “epilepsy”. They speak in code, because the truth is too awful to say, even to God.

There’s another truth too awful to say: birth can be a brutally violent act. Mary witnesses this when her father helps a mare give birth. “Mare and foal, though of the same flesh, are warring, two warring things, not like a mother and its young, each fighting the other, except that the foal is stronger, her energy and her thrusting prodigal now.” Soon after, Mary becomes pregnant. When James finds out, he attacks her with a broom stick trying to cause a miscarriage. He was kinder to the horse and foal.

This is Ireland in the 1990s. Abortion is illegal. Bishops control the medical profession, and society decries the “abortion holocaust” taking place in England. Mary concludes suicide is her only option. Betty, an older cousin, rescues Mary from the river and figures out her secret. She helps Mary get to England, but a neighbor discovers the plan and alerts the authorities. Betty and Mary are brought back to Ireland before the abortion occurs.

Now the bishops and lawyers get involved. Mary becomes public property, and the public presumes to know what is best for the born and unborn. But the public only knows Mary as the “Magdalene” so how could they know best.

Time is relentless, and a decision must be made. But who gets to make it. Everyone demands to be heard, but whose voice should be heard? It’s telling we don’t hear Mary’s voice until the end. It’s beautiful.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Absurdistan: Love and Geopolitics

Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan is a geopolitical romp that ends on September 10, 2001. But the book was published in 2006 – so make no mistake – 9/11 hangs over the narrative like an ominous cloud. Don’t make this mistake either – though 9/11 was a tragedy and geopolitical catastrophe, the novel is a raunchy and satirical examination of life when you’re a geopolitical pawn. And we’re all geopolitical pawns.

As the narrator, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, tells us in the prologue, this is a “book about love. But it’s also a book about geography.” The story opens on June 15, 2001. Misha is 30 years old and the son of the 1238th richest man in Russia. That’s because his father is a kleptocrat.

During the 1990s Misha attended Accidental College in the mid-west. As a result he adores America and rap music. His rapper name is Snack Daddy, because he loves all the snacks that have turned him into a self-described “fatso”. Unfortunately, his father called him back to Russia, and he is stuck there because dad killed a politically connected Oklahoman in St. Petersburg. Now the U.S. won’t let Misha back.

Misha hates Russia and its corrupt transition from the Soviet Union – even though he has benefitted tremendously from that corruption. “These miscreants were our country’s rulers. To survive in their world, one has to wear many hats – perpetrator, victim, silent bystander.” He’s desperate to get back to his girlfriend in the Bronx – so desperate he travels to Absurdistan, where he has been promised a Belgian passport that will enable him to finally return to the U.S.

Absurdistan does not exist in the real world. I googled it. However, in the novel it is one of the Stans in the former Soviet Union. It consists of several ethnic groups, and they all hate each other. As soon as Misha shows up, civil war breaks out and the borders are closed. Each ethnic group wants to use Misha for its own political purposes, and Misha wants to use them to escape to the Bronx and his girlfriend. Sex, humor, and violence ensue.

Similar to Candide, Misha is a “holy fool” who is wrong about pretty much everything. Near the novel’s end he confesses, “I thought I was Different and had a Special Story to tell but I guess I’m not and I don’t.” Fortunately, he’s wrong about that as well.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Charlottesville 2017

These stained statues must be preserved
through violence if need be
because if they're not great
neither are we.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief