AMANDA BOYDEN LAUNCHES BABYLON ROLLING AT THIS IS NOT A READING SERIES. AUG 6, 8:30PM (DOORS 8PM). GLADSTONE HOTEL BALLROOM, 1214 QUEEN W. FREE.
Five families — one black middle class, one white middle class, one black poor, one white poor and one upwardly mobile South Asian — all converge on one New Orleans street over a pre-Katrina year. Noting that the car-crash narrative device is now toast, what incident could bring this neighbourhood together at the beginning of Babylon Rolling (Knopf, 301 pages, $29.95), the second novel by Amanda Boyden?
In a distinctly Nola twist, Boyden chooses a devastating barbeque accident. Just beyond that early flash however, Babylon Rolling struggles to start, weighted down with a too-large cast all charged with the leaden job of explicating race in the United States today. Yet once Boyden finishes with introductions she’s able to play with our expectations of the networked narrative and create stunning passages. With multiple characters in a tight page count — as with episodic TV — the reader tends to choose favourites. Cerise and Joe Brown are elderly, wise and creatively weak. Also less-than-complex is Ariel, a Minneapolis transplant whose subtle white-girl racism is exorcised through a workplace affair. Babylon Rolling really belongs to its fuck-ups though, as Boyden teases more depth and pathos out of them.
Ed is Ariel’s stay-at-home husband who spends the year in a boozy freefall from being a well-meaning liberal and “Buddhist” (during an early row over environmentalism, Ariel screams at Ed, “You’re going to fuck me into riding a street car?”) to being a despondent Mardi Gras wastrel. The book hinges on Fearius, a Mephistophelean 15-year-old crack dealer whom Boyden writes in convincing street patois. Fearius’ pages alone are their own killer story.
All their paths begin to realistically cross during and after the evacuation from the near miss of Hurricane Ivan. Literally lurking about all this is neighbourhood cuckoo Prancie, a Flannery O’Connor–like character who expresses her insanity through baking and whose import is revealed slowly and steadily.
Like O’Connor, Boyden is a great prose stylist but also suffers from O’Connor’s occasional flaw of taking descriptions one analogy too far. I’m thinking specifically of Boyden’s “Summer drapes itself around Ariel’s neck like a stole. Like a giant piece of raw bacon stole.” When she’s in control of her craft, as in the prologue, her writing is exquisitely measured: “We shoulder the rummy, pissy weeks before Lent when our city goes into heat. Squawking for titties, wearing cameras, the magpies come in throngs, overload branches, mate and shit, everyone swooping at glittering strings of nothing worth fighting for.”
Writing about the Big Easy — given its new meaning as America’s ground zero in the war against its poor — is nothing but difficult. Despite that, and an unwieldy canvas, Boyden’s threads mostly come together by Babylon Rolling’s brutal, unsentimental and wholly compelling end.