Ratz Are Nice

Rating:
Summary: Another voice searching for tongue space
Review: Short and sour. "Ratz Are Nice: (Psp)" is a small book that pushes big buttons. Author Braithwaite obviously knows what he is about and tells a story from the intra-abdominal site. Characters are believeable and he makes us care about them. But the problem with wading through the hieroglyphics and lingo, page layout and punctuation oddities in the end detracts from the idea of the novel. It just becomes kitsch. If you feel you must read this book, I suggest you start with the Author's Notes: this reads with great ease and wit and venom. For the rest, the work involved in getting there doesn't seem to justify the payoff.....at least to this reader.

Rating:
Summary: Ratz Are Nice
Review: Those who read Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite's first novel, the inexplicably overlooked Wigger, will recognize the Victoria writer's performative prose and irascible voice in his latest work. Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is the story of Edison, a black skinhead navigating the mean streets and meaner syntax of the skinhead/rudeboy scene (PSP stands for "pure street punk"). Braithwaite's narrative oscillates between first and third person, sometimes directing Edison's I outward, and at other times presenting us with an omniscient eye watching the various skinhead gangsters scheming and thugging 24/7. The narrative strategy works because the characters themselves exist in a continually shifting subcultural terrain: white skinheads who flirt with neo-Nazism but recognize that the culture they love is derived from Caribbean ska; black skinheads who are surrounded by what have become, to the dominant culture, symbols of white power; militaristic machismo fused with gay male erotics. The effect is something like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders shoved head-first through the identity politics looking glass; we come out the other side with a text whose hot-blooded postmodernism depicts a violence without the pretense of heroism, and a celebration of disenfranchisement without the clichés of identity-mongering (Braithwaite depicts Edison as shining shoes for a living without once playing the image for pathos). In Braithwaite's hands, skinhead/rudeboy culture becomes an exemplar of the psychic balkanization that comes with being black in British Columbia, a place that bars easy appropriations of Afrocentrism. Braithwaite does with the subculture what Attila Richard Lukacs, a visual artist who also eroticizes skinhead imagery, fails to do: Ratz Are Nice (PSP) offers more than a voyeuristic gaze, but takes seriously the realpolitik of the subculture, including what is at stake culturally, racially and sexually. The comparison to visual art is apt, partly because of the way Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is narrated typographically. Braithwaite's English is not only given to the reclamation of hip-hop phonetics, but font-play, idiosyncratic punctuation, and a layout that tells as much of the story as the words themselves. And like a literary Jean-Michel Basquiat, Braithwaite succeeds in mashing up our too-settled categories of prose and identity.

Rating:
Summary: Ratz Are Nice
Review: Those who read Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite's first novel, the inexplicably overlooked Wigger, will recognize the Victoria writer's performative prose and irascible voice in his latest work. Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is the story of Edison, a black skinhead navigating the mean streets and meaner syntax of the skinhead/rudeboy scene (PSP stands for "pure street punk"). Braithwaite's narrative oscillates between first and third person, sometimes directing Edison's I outward, and at other times presenting us with an omniscient eye watching the various skinhead gangsters scheming and thugging 24/7. The narrative strategy works because the characters themselves exist in a continually shifting subcultural terrain: white skinheads who flirt with neo-Nazism but recognize that the culture they love is derived from Caribbean ska; black skinheads who are surrounded by what have become, to the dominant culture, symbols of white power; militaristic machismo fused with gay male erotics. The effect is something like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders shoved head-first through the identity politics looking glass; we come out the other side with a text whose hot-blooded postmodernism depicts a violence without the pretense of heroism, and a celebration of disenfranchisement without the clichés of identity-mongering (Braithwaite depicts Edison as shining shoes for a living without once playing the image for pathos). In Braithwaite's hands, skinhead/rudeboy culture becomes an exemplar of the psychic balkanization that comes with being black in British Columbia, a place that bars easy appropriations of Afrocentrism. Braithwaite does with the subculture what Attila Richard Lukacs, a visual artist who also eroticizes skinhead imagery, fails to do: Ratz Are Nice (PSP) offers more than a voyeuristic gaze, but takes seriously the realpolitik of the subculture, including what is at stake culturally, racially and sexually. The comparison to visual art is apt, partly because of the way Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is narrated typographically. Braithwaite's English is not only given to the reclamation of hip-hop phonetics, but font-play, idiosyncratic punctuation, and a layout that tells as much of the story as the words themselves. And like a literary Jean-Michel Basquiat, Braithwaite succeeds in mashing up our too-settled categories of prose and identity.

Rating:
Summary: Might Work Better on Film
Review: What can I say? As a book, this is awful. The "startling multiethnic lyrical phrasing" that the jacket praises, just doesn't do the trick. And unless you're a glutton for wading through experimental writing, and annoying typography (hey, I used to be a book typesetter, I love innovate type work, this is just lame) it's boring. Somehow, I get the impression I might have actually enjoyed it if it had been a movie. There, I could have gotten into the rythym of the language and the lives a bit more, but on print it's a dud. And the story of two rival skinhead crews is fairly banal. I've yet to read any book about the skinhead subculture that rises above cliche or pulp fiction, and this is certainly no exception. The author's notes are sort of interesting, except that there are some errors and typos throughout (for example, the 2-Tone band is The Selecter, not The Selecters, the famous rocksteady producer is Sonia Pottinger, not Portinger), and the bit about hardcore is seriously flawed. I dunno, maybe Canadians, or homosexuals will get more out of it than I did. I'd be interested in seeing a movie of it though.

Rating:
Summary: Might Work Better on Film
Review: What can I say? As a book, this is awful. The "startling multiethnic lyrical phrasing" that the jacket praises, just doesn't do the trick. And unless you're a glutton for wading through experimental writing, and annoying typography (hey, I used to be a book typesetter, I love innovate type work, this is just lame) it's boring. Somehow, I get the impression I might have actually enjoyed it if it had been a movie. There, I could have gotten into the rythym of the language and the lives a bit more, but on print it's a dud. And the story of two rival skinhead crews is fairly banal. I've yet to read any book about the skinhead subculture that rises above cliche or pulp fiction, and this is certainly no exception. The author's notes are sort of interesting, except that there are some errors and typos throughout (for example, the 2-Tone band is The Selecter, not The Selecters, the famous rocksteady producer is Sonia Pottinger, not Portinger), and the bit about hardcore is seriously flawed. I dunno, maybe Canadians, or homosexuals will get more out of it than I did. I'd be interested in seeing a movie of it though.