Fast Eddie, King of the Bees
Robert Arellano
Akashic
180 pp.
Available from Amazon.
|
(Editor's Note: You may be wondering while we're reviewing a novel in "&" rather than in Bookshelf. To clarify: Bookshelf dedicates an entire month to a representative selection of releases from a small press, while & covers individual releases. While Akashic and some other publishers send us their books on a regular basis, we don't want to hold them 'til we have enough to cover in Bookshelf. Hence the confusion.)
Genre often functions as a useful means of identifying new works in which
one might be interested, by means of categorizing them amongst other, similar
works of the past. Of course, in independent music this has been taken to a
ludicrous extreme ("Emo," "twee," "aggro": is this music or Muppets? And
don't get me started on "math rock"). Literature, like music, has developed
ever-narrowing definitions of genre, as huge publishers and mega-retail
outlets compete for the all-important middle-aged woman and man dollar.
This is why, when you walk into Barnes and Noble, you may find a section
titled not "History" but "World War II." Or, for that matter, a section
apart from "Literature" themed "Oprah Literature".
Given this consistent narrowing of focus, it is always pleasant to read a
book that laughs at the idea of classification. Fast Eddie, King of the
Bees is a coming-of-age tale of a sort, and a cyberpunk novel of a sort
(though more in tone than in subject matter), and an allegory of a sort, and
a Greek Tragedy of a sort, and definitely a Dickens homage of a sort.
Most importantly, though, it escapes all of these categorizations and
manages to be a thoughtful, pulse-pounding, hilarious story about a
tremendously engaging character named Eddie.
Eddie was born a foundling, set apart from the tens of thousands of orphans
who litter the streets of the near-future Boston (in which the book is set)
only by his enormous feet. At first, the reader may be apprehensive about
this last; since Gunter Grass, everyone seems to have a yen for the child
grotesque. Worse, many writers employ these variously disfigured children
more as symbols than as characters. Fortunately, Arellano uses the feet only
as a plot device, giving Eddie tremendous speed as well as (sorry) an
Achilles heel.
The young Eddie has spent his first decade working for a blind thief.
Arellano is none-too-subtle with introducing the story from which his book
takes its shape: on the first page, Eddie refers to his mentor in crime,
Shep, as "a makeshift Fagin, my only pal." It is clear, then, that Arellano
has written an update of Oliver Twist for the twenty-first century,
complete with the requisite likeable urchin posessed of stunning verbal
acumen.
As the novel opens, Eddie is "pretzel boy", in a street performance that is
an integral part of Shep's thievery. As the public watches Eddie contort into,
and then extricate himself from, various Houdini-like situations, Shep's
other "students" size the crowd up, follow them when they leave and then
filch their wallets. In the future America of Arellano's vision, the dollar
has been devalued, the rich have gotten even richer and the poor are
ever more numerous. Shep's is but one of many groups of orphaned
child-thieves, raised by adults who function as parents, school and
employer. Eddie's relationship with Shep is fraught; on one hand, he is the
old thiefmaster's closest confidant (he's the only student, for instance,
who is aware that Shep is not, as he claims, blind). At the same time,
Eddie is a thorn in Shep's side, constantly pestering him about his
parentage.
The thiefmaster serves as a perfect example of Arellano's skill with
characterization. Shep is, first and foremost, a hard-nosed crook who
thinks nothing of exploiting and corrupting children into a life of
crime. On the other hand, though Shep never directly acknowledges that he
cares about his charges beyond their ability to earn for him, he conducts
rigorous weekend classes that educate his charges far beyond their stated
aims:
"...as he saw it, long-term understanding of how white-collar investments
would factor into our gray collarless levies required trigonometry and
calculus, and getting a leg up on rival packs' business plans involved not
just the ability to read, but also powers of composition, rhetoric and
oratory. He turned the concentrated education of his charges into a
personal obsession."
As Eddie enters his teens he becomes Shep's most artful and effective
pickpocket, so skillful that he teaches a class to neophytes on the
weekends. Eddie's singleminded determination, though, is to discover his
parentage. When he gives several years' savings to a shady "filial
identification" service, he is launched into the series of bizarre events
and coincidences that make up the bulk of the novel.
Like Dickens, Arellano places a premium on comparing the lives of the rich
to those of the poor; unlike Dickens, however, Arellano does not set up
Eddie's nouveau-riches parents as paragons of achievement and virtue.
His father turns out to be a sewage magnate-cum mayor of Ho-Ho-Kus, New
Jersey. Eddie's mother is a pulchritudinous Mrs. Robinson figure for whom
Eddie's feelings are definitely not filial. They swath him in kindness and
material comfort, but Eddie is still haunted by the urge to roam and a
pervading fear of Apple Jack, the underworld figure who controls most of the
Eastern Seaboard and gives Eddie's father his marching orders. Eventually,
the suburbs stifle him; Eddie heads once more for the open road.
One of the best aspects of Arellano's writing style is the sheer joy he
takes in words for words' sake. Consider Eddie's description of his eerie
success in avoiding speeding tickets when he takes a job as a bus driver:
"It didn't require any highfalutin system, radar scanning, or channelling
nineteen for smokies. Rather, there was a Zen to it like that of
wallet-lifting: slipping by like you belong, bolting through like lightning,
and for the love of Pete, never -- especially when encountering a surprise
speed trap -- slowing up or otherwise exhibiting signs of culpability... This
was my sublimated subversion, the vicarious vent for all the criminal
energies of my upbringing. In the treacherous trousers of the Northeast
known as the tri-state area, the great highways were as pockets, and my
shuttle snaked through folds and furrows like a slick, steely finger, every
day's record time better than a fat billfold packed with cabbage."
This is the way that we imagine our thoughts: quick, smooth and supple as we
glide through the internal monologues that delineate our lives. In reality,
of course, our thought processes are nowhere near this eloquent or witty; it
is for precisely this reason that the book is such a pleasure.
As Eddie heads back to Boston to uncover the secrets of his past
and fulfill his place in the world, the novel's pace quickens to a blur.
This is where Arellano stumbles; this is his first novel, and he encounters
first-novel problems, especially when it comes time to resolve the web of
plotlines he has spun. Eddie's reversals of fortune eventually become too
rapid-fire to accept, as if the author had condensed a thousand pages
into the final third of the book. There is still great writing here, but it
often fails to develop all of the possibilities it suggests.
Quibbiling aside, this book is a blast to read. I expect great things from
Robert Arellano.
-- Brett McCallon
|
