Asphalt : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Captivating
Review: An urban tale written in a refreshing challenging intellectual style. Set in post apocalyptic Brooklyn, the main character struggles to build a life in a war zone. His physical surroundings play as an apt metaphor for his internal quest to make sense of who he is, where he came from and where he ultimately belongs.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: Asphalt
Carl Hancock Rux 5 stars
Outstanding Story!

As a fan of Carl, I have to say that his use of words and his ability to craft a story so vivid makes him an exceptionally talented writer. I was expecting a well crafted story from him but I was in awe of just how vivid and emotionally charged this novel was.
The story of Racine and his brother Francis was emotional as well as Couchette's story. This novel reads like part memoir of a boy bounced around the foster care system. Their emotions, feelings of abandonment, desires and dreams will grab you.
The back drop of the book, a war torn NewYork was absolutely disturbing! After going through 9/11 these scenes are so vivid it put a lump in my throat reading it. The scene of the Brooklyn Bridge in ruins was devastating. With everything happening in the world today this wasn't hard to visualize and down right scary.
The book may be hard to grasp for some. You may have to inhale this slowly and think about what he means at times. The poetics are Brilliant!.
Carl's minimal use of words strike a big impact. This story was outstanding, emotionally charged and the descriptions will blow you away.
reviewed by
Dawn
Mahogany
Albany, N.Y.




Rating:
Summary: Buy more than one copy
Review: Asphalt is an amazing journey through an urban landscape that takes you back in time. By giving detailed descriptions of music, architect, historical reference, smells, and travels, one leaves each page experiencing the familiar and the unknown. Rux allows the reader to be captivated by the world of Couchette and Racine; and the ending will have you longing for more or rewinding as if you need to embody the words of your favorite movie on the page.

Rating:
Summary: LAYERED, PROVOCATIVE, THEORETICAL
Review: Besides what has already been said about this book--that it is highly poetic, filled with dream images and painterly depictions of an apocolyptic urbanity, Rux's novel brings with it a portrait of oppression in a twilight state. The structure of the first part of this novel speaks to a confidance carefully maintained by people who are in denial (of their politicism, personal lives, statehood, spirituality, etc.) even when they are walking through a battlefield. Racine does not reveal his own psychosis, or fears. He does not acknowledge them. He simply moves forward, observing and listening to everybody else's mania. But when he gets to the party for the reconstruction of the bridge, and meets an old friend, we experiance a terror, the destruction of an attempt at reconstruction, or connecting. The clash between history, reality, and the non-committal, apolitical bubble some of us use to convince ourselves that we are "all right" even if the rest of the world isn't, comes crashing down. There are so many groups Rux's illustration applies to, I can't even begin to touch on what this novel really says about the relationship between our state of being and our state of pretending to be--this book will be studied and taught years from now.

Rating:
Summary: Rux runs the voodoo down!
Review: Carl Hancock Rux's debut novel is an astounding literary achievement. A feverdream of reconciliation and survival, his characters lug their personal baggage - filled to the brim with the lies, crimes, and struggles of generations past and present -through a devastated landscape in search of kind of fertile oasis. And through it all Rux displays an immense talent, as rule bending and visionary as a literary Basquiat. To be sure, he plunges his readers into the deep end of the pool, but it is a pool filled with stunning depth and vitality. I have no doubt that this novel will become required reading for future college students studying the African American Novel in the 21st Century. The good news is you don't have to wait that long to get hip to a new and very important voice on the scene today.

Rating:
Summary: Utterly haunting
Review: I finished this book last night, and it still feels like it's happening, still unraveling, unfolding and unmasking its secrets and meanings. The ghosts of Carl's poetic language and nuancies still floating through my mind. This is a novel you don't want to rush through. Like discovering Henry Miller, so exciting how someone can make a sentence, a phrase, a line that's never been before. Carl is a craftsman with vocabulary: such painstaking detail in just one sentence, then the rest of the chapter can just flow out in a wash of lyrical descriptions, the page taking over. The range of his music references alone will strike you. This is a story of pain and healing, of forgetting and remembering, devastation and re-creation, powerlessness and fierce will-power, blind faith and hopelessness, of being an outsider and of wild inner imaginings. It will posess you before you know it. Stay with it through to the end, and it will reward you.

Rating:
Summary: This generation's James Baldwin?
Review: If James Balwin were thirtysomething, part of the hip-hop generation, living in a post 9/11 era this is a novel he might well have written. Rux's post-apocalyptic tale/myth is really at its core a journey of self-discovery told in a prose style that's poetic, at times dense, really heady, yet absolutely lyrical, even mesmerizing. If, like me, you are a reader who is dazzled by the simple beauty of words, Rux is the wordsmith for you: it is as if he labored over ever single sentence, agonizing until he found the precise sequence of words all to a positively mellifluous effect. This potpourri of greek mythology, urban reality and verbal gymnastics is a difficult but thoroughly enjoyable read. Half the fun is figuring out what is real and what is imagined.

Rating:
Summary: Magnum Opus
Review: Just finished this book. OUTSTANDING! Complicated in the most divine way. Rux is on to something that has nothing to do with the average easy read bookstores are pumping right now. This book is so relevant to right now and I haven't seen any other new black writers dealing with the political climate in America from the standpoint of people of color. Correction; Rux doesn't even paint a picture of the current political climate, he's on to the next canvas and it's stunning and heartbreaking.

Rating:
Summary: Asphalt acclaim
Review: LA Times
"Asphalt," (is) a hallucinatory journey...set in a sooty, just-a-day-after-tomorrow future. The book blends speculative fiction and myth with real-life post-9/11 unease embroidered throughout...enamored with densely arranged assemblages -quirky juxtapositions, blurry borders-spinning dross into gold...a grand-scale collage."

Jill Nelson, author of Sexual Healing
"Daring, intense, and provocative, in ASPHALT Hancock Rux fast forwards the novel form into a future that is unexpected, seductive and healing."

New York Press
"Asphalt, (is) a book taken with future apocalypses and the funky, oddly swaddled cast of characters littering that not-too-distant time in Brooklyn. In Asphalt , you get hetero guys in sequins and sarongs, back-from-Paris DJs and couch dancers named Couchette all vying for attention in a newly gentrifying netherworld that Rux ably and surrealistically, sweetly, ties together before the next set."

The Daily Pennsylvanian
"(Asphalt is) both arresting and disorienting. The cryptic opening scenes illustrate Rux's masterful use of language-remarkable....Asphalt is a triumph in several senses...a piece of true urban literature that appeals to the jaded sensibilities of young modern readers."

Greg Tate author of "Everything But the Burden"
"Asphalt gets at how the urban myth of 'keeping it real' must continually run up against the abstracting roadblocks and revelations of one's fractured inner truth and the even sexier surrealism of a Cosmopolis determined to remix your imagination at every turn. Like Celine's Journey, Baraka's System and Delany's Dahlgren this is a novel where the mythopoeic modern city is the real protagonist and the ostensible hero, like all of us, is just a squirrel trying not to nut out."

LA Weekly
"Asphalt...is thick with images of and meditations on terror and terrorism...underscoring emotion and politics, allowing Rux to excavate the damaged inner lives of his characters while ruminating on how the world around them feeds their despair and dares them to rise above self and surroundings. "

Booklist
"Rux's lyrical writing blurs the lines between dreamscape and reality. A dazzling portrait of urban life."

Publishers Weekly
"Lyrically drawn...an elegantly gloomy addition to Rux's artistic achievements."

Brooklyn Rail
"Asphalt is a beautifully written book...as horrifying to read as it is full of hope."

Black Issues Book Review
"The first lines of this first fiction effort promises a mélange of literary forms and edgy melancholy characters...part postmodern parable, part contemporary urban portrait...parts aside, it is fully formed, like an existential poem."

Blether Book Reviews
"Carl Hancock Rux provides a deep look at disturbed individuals in environs in which no one can dodge a world on the abyss."

Rating:
Summary: I plan to read this book again.
Review: This book is more than just post-apocalyptic New York. This book grows as you read it: rich in emotion, deeply symbolic, and reflective of the journey everyone makes in their own lives as they deal with pain suffered in the past.