Misery Business With Pickles On Top

How committed this slim book is to rolling in the muck of listless, lethargic apathy whilst coming of age in the 21st Century. Commits to its protagonist without potential. A protagonist that is an alcoholic pregnant pizza delivery girl (yup, you read that right), who descends into her own mental wasteland after she becomes attached to a customer that reaches out to her with an odd request for pizza toppings. Pizza Girl just commits, takes risks, and delivers (groan) a slice (groan) of unlikable characterization that can be of an acquired taste this side of pickles on pizza. 

With the hazy hustle of Los Angeles as the backdrop, our Pizza Girl is trudging through the mire of her existence. Fresh out of high school, she lives with her Korean immigrant mother who idolizes any and everything American (subtly coded as American = "Whiteness") and high school beau/baby daddy Billy who dropped his college plans and sports dreams to become a proper, supportive father. Both are well-meaning, but dote on her to an almost infantile, suppressive degree. She also hasn't reconciled over the lost of her alcoholic father, as his chaotic presence lingers in the car she makes deliveries in and the backyard shed where our Pizza Girl retreats for early morning booze binges. Her deliveries have her in contact with a collage of offbeat characters, but they don't stand out as much as Jenny, and her curiosity over the frazzled stay-at-home mom who out of the mundane blue requests pickles on her pizza for her finnicky son, functions as a distraction from her daily despondency. Jenny curiously connects with our Pizza Girl, but soon an awkward one-sided infatuation grows, unfurling into something a bit more convoluted, insidious even. 

Fast-paced and readable, this has a dark, sarcastic humor mixed in with millennial malaise that at times had me laugh out loud or wince --- depending on mood --- as Jean Kyoung Frazier is spot-on about how transient, tense, and truly ridiculous, your emerging twenties are. There is also a familiar set-up here, as it is this zany tightrope walk between the adolescent acerbity of Juno, despondent minimum wage of pending mamahood of Waitress, and the dire delusions of Taxi Driver. It comes across redundant, but Frazier's prose allows her tale to wobble and walk well into being a wholly original and engaging world which I appreciated.

What I didn't appreciate?: Making a character do 180 serial killer shit as some dark comedic "character development". 

Yeah...big nope.

Spoilers abound...

Out of the Mouths of Babes...

Before A Confederacy of Dunces, a 16-year-old John Kennedy Toole wrote The Neon Bible, a quiet, but crisply intense bidungsroman about a young boy growing up in a claustrophobic Mississippi town thick with prejudice and religious discord during World War II. Upon finishing the story, Toole viewed the work as juvenile, and filed it away. Decades later, and after Toole posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for A Confederacy of Dunces in 1984, fans of the work and the curious inquired about the possibility of other misbegotten Toole works, with Toole's mother happy to oblige with a work she had discovered among her late son's effects. As W. Kenneth Holditch recounts in the introduction, Toole's mother was determined to have it published to share more of her son's genius, and after some legal tussles and qualms among the Toole family, The Neon Bible saw publication in 1989. Yet, for all the fuss and legal red tape cut to get it published, The Neon Bible skipped the fanfare of accolades and awards that showered Dunces, finding itself once again filed away and forgotten, save for a 1995 Terence Davies-directed film adaptation that too is overlooked these days. 

Usually I approach books written by young authors with some skepticism, but largely pass on reading works that an author never finished, or didn't allow permission to be published. There is something rather...intrusive, lacking about reading incomplete thoughts, ideas, or words that the author wanted to keep private for the sake of their craft. It's why I took some slight delight at people getting pissed about the content of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, as with its controversial publication, reader's discovered their beloved "civil rights hero" lawyer Attitcus Finch was "shockingly" revealed as a racist. Sometimes you just don't poke the bear... Toole didn't want The Neon Bible published as he wrote it as a teen and felt the work naive, and as a young writer myself (who has a persistent fear of my own crappy drafts and word vomits being published without my permission), I tend to respect that. 

Well...until I ate my words, poked the bear, and was rewarded with reading one of the best, and most haunting, melancholic meditations concerning the tightrope walk from adolescence to adulthood. 

A Girl Grows Up In Brooklyn

"I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this."

Black girlhood has never been written with such poetic potency.

Even though I grew up in a suburban South Texas neighborhood during the 1990s and went to predominately White schools, I understood this story fully. Reading this book was like re-entering my childhood, just this time I got to view it from a distance, finding myself appreciating the sometimes arduous, often awkward journey that was growing up Girl.

It is true that we all experience growing pains and angst. We all at some points of our lives vie to belong somewhere and find “our people”. We all have felt the flutter of first love. We all begin to see our elders live confusing, convoluted lives, and hope to God we don’t turn out like them in the end. We have all become aware of our maturing bodies, wondering where our unique beauty lies within the images we see on TV screens. We all have friendships that are fleeting, sometimes one-sided, but shape us beyond the time frame. And we will at some point, by some strange osmosis, have these friendships come back to us, just that a new script will be in tow.

No matter the gender or the race, we all come of age in similar ways, but Another Brooklyn pinpoints a unique adolescent. The announcement is right in the title. This is 'another Brooklyn', a Brooklyn removed from the Irish immigrant experience of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, and more specifically, a city, a time era, and a racial community removed from Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I don’t know if this was Jacqueline Woodson's intent --- I’m just taking a stab in the dark --- but while reading echoes of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn sound, with Another Brooklyn's narrator August sharing the same lonely, but fiercely determined spirit as Francine Nolan. Still, I feel, Woodson is also making a point to say that Brooklyn is too often defined through a White lens, when the city holds so many more conversations and stories outside of that limited focus.