Slapboxing with Jesus

Rating:
Summary: Lives up to his reviews
Review: After seeing his positively glowing review in the San Francisco Chronicle (they compared his book to Joyce, Faulkner AND Carver) I assumed nothing could live up to such hype, but I feel like taking the chance of saying it does. Most people these days don't want to consider let alone admit that a present day work might in any way be a future classic, but I believe this is. It has all the elements: vigor, vibrant new uses of language and voice, and a markedly bright intelligence working the strings behind all these lives. What doesn't seem expressed enough is how deeply humorous a writer Victor LaValle tends to be as well. I could see so many of these stories spiralling into unending sadness and melodrama in a lesser writer's hands, but what saves him every time is that his characters laugh, but even more, I did. I will just go ahead with it, Victor LaValle's Slapboxing with Jesus will be remembered as one of the more enduring collections of stories in this new generation of writing. My hat's off.

Rating:
Summary: NOT A GOOD TEACHER
Review: Books written about the street aren't necessarily good. Some people believe that if you show enough realism and grittiness, in essence, show the street as it truly is, art will result. They're wrong, as is evidenced by this generic collection of stories about young boys sexing it up, fighting, pimping, killing, and basically living like animals. There's something really creepy and unsettling about the subject matter that Lavalle has chosen.

I must tell you from the outset that I do not believe in collections of stories that have thin connections between each other, mostly when it's through the characters. To me, they are written by writers without enough vision to craft a novel. They write a lot of stories and then they concoct that they go together. The same goes for this book.

All of the stories have to do with young men or boy-children. The first couple of stories work the best because the novelty of the subject and setting hasn't got old yet. In "ancient history" two friends vie to become successful. "pops" concerns the first meeting between a boy and his cop father, with all the ensuing awkwardness. "kids on colden street" shows a boy who gets a kid sister and becomes her protector. In the end he realizes he can protect her from nothing.

While I thought the stories in this book were adequate, there was something too craftsmanlike about them. None of the characters were really established enough to care about them through the whole volume. While it had spats of good writing, it was mostly just average.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing Else Like It
Review: I am a high school creative writing student, and last summer I was blessed with the opportunity to work with Victor LaValle in a fiction seminar at Columbia University in NYC. The experience was incredible, and the feedback and encouragement that Victor gave each of us - to take chances, to be different, to write something that had never before been written - was invaluable. I remember that I had written a poem and hastily titled it "Untitled": Victor shook his head, and I scribbled a title on the paper, "Self-Inflicted Pain". Victor used this experience to illustrate to the class the potential of a stomach-punching title: the next day, he passed out to us copies of his new manuscript. He had been working on it for years, and proudly announced that it was his first book, and that it would be available a few months later. I looked at the title page: SLAPBOXING WITH JESUS. Phew. He read selections from it out loud to us, and asked us to critique his writing, which we were - as eager teenagers - proud to do. His prose is unique and strong, and I was ecstatic to find that he was a teacher who took his own advice: 1) a short story is only a flash in the pan in a character's lifetime - make sure that the character has a history and a future; 2) write something that you would want to read, and that doesn't already exist on another writer's notepad (probably better-written there, too). SLAPBOXING WITH JESUS is worth reading, if not for its literary technique or emotional storyline, than for the experience of reading a work that no one has ever read before now.

Rating:
Summary: Read it in one day
Review: I'm an English teacher and have been trying to find something I can give to my higher level english classes that will challenge them, but will somehow speak to them a bit more closely than Heart Of Drakness or Dubliners. I picked up LaValle's book because of a review I'd read in the Los Angeles Times and it paid off. I doubted my kids might be able to relate to the expriences involved, but the author won me over into realizing they couldn't relate to a riverboat captain going through Africa, but they still liked that very much in the end. It's literature I've realized, this book. The language is shockingly great, not because of vulgarity but because it's good to see a young author take the time to insure a poetic voice and lyricism that seems missing so much from those under thirty. I am planning to use the book in our next trimester and will be including it as our only contemporary fiction by a young author in their twenties. I am amazed and heartened to know that literature is still being created.

Rating:
Summary: Prepare to be slapped!
Review: LaValle's prose is poetic--pain that sings, danger that seduces, humiliation that leaves an oddly sweet taste in the mouth of the humiliated. There are no barriers he does not transcend, in form and content. I wish I could say I couldn't put this book down, but I had to, since every story hits with such force. The recovery time was worth it, though; this is the best book I've read in years.

Rating:
Summary: Shadowboxing with legends
Review: SLAPBOXING is a collection of inter-related, but largely independent, short stories centered around life in NYC, spanning the last three decades. The scope of the works presage greater thing to come from Victor Lavalle, particularly once you get by the hype and ignore the comparisons.

I had to reread the stories - it's reasonably quick read - because my response after the first completion was "so what?" I realized I had approached this often dark and somber assortment with expectations of discovering some modern era consolidation of Wright/Ellison/Hughes. Victor Lavalle is none of them, nor should he be. But this collection provides every indication he will carve out a separate and distinct niche.

Overall, the stories are good, in fact, very good. "Ancient History" with its' creative utilization of blended narration was my personal favorite. The themes are not necessarily new or unique, especially if you are cognizant the real fictional aspect is in the assignation of characters rather than the events described which are repeated day after day, decade after decade.

I found the appeal to be in the construction and composition rather than what he had to say. Every writer need not be cathartic and there is little to uplift your spirit in this collection. It is the stark yet incisve style that is most compelling.

Rating:
Summary: Short stories collection
Review: These are a collection of stories of guys growing up on the street of New York. The stories deal with relationship, missing fathers, prostitution, teasing, and other things teens go through. The stories make you think. I throught some of the stories ended kinda of strange, but they were still good.

Rating:
Summary: Stick and Jab, Stick and Jab
Review: This was an extremely well-written collection of interconnected vignettes. The author's language and style really jump in your face and nearly knock you out (yeah, bad pun, I know). I don't know if it was intentional, but each story made me want just a little bit more. I don't need happy endings as a reader, as a matter of fact I don't always need an ending, but I got lost between a few of the stories. Would really love to see how Lavalle use his abilities to make words move in a complete novel -- he has great talent and I'm guessing I'll read much of his work in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Superhero Wordsmithing
Review: Victor D. Lavalle's work rushes over you with incredible twists of wording. He gives us a city life not soaked in streetslang and the typical gutterplace we'd expect, but instead, turns us on to a sensible Brooklyn, a place that does resonate with us, even if we're from the burbs. Extraordinary.