LOST IN THE WOODS (Excerpt)
By J.D. Smith

[…] If Marc Nesbitt portrays the state of the culture as tragedy, Rex Rose portrays it mostly as farce. His first novel, Toast, features perhaps the most breathtakingly vacuous character American fiction has seen for quite a while. Rose is not stumbling into this, though, or passing off his protagonist as an avatar of better living through superficiality. He knows precisely what he is doing, and he presents us with, in all her cosmetic splendor, Ms. Prytania Relf, a 22-year-old defined more by her white-girl dreadlocks and multiple piercings than any character trait. She states as a creed, "It's like when you're really stylin', that's the closest to God you're ever gonna get, you know." Without a conventional view of Mammon, either, the closest she comes to financial planning is making enough in tips during a bartending shift to afford a taxi ride home. This makes plausible passages of interior monologue such as "Fuck! she reasoned," or an epiphany that is stated, "I guess I'm a woman now. Fuck. Fuck! I guess this means I won't like MTV or 90210 anymore, either, she said to herself disgustedly." Without other resources, she is sustained by her adaptability, her amorphous good nature, and, as we are several times reminded, her not-inconsiderable breasts.

Such a broadly drawn character would seem preposterous if there didn't seem to be so many individuals roughly fitting her description in the country's coffeehouses, campuses, and cities. Without other value systems or forms of affiliation, tribal identities that have minimal codes and pedigrees but plenty of sartorial elaboration provide an emotional exoskeleton in lieu of internal supports. These individuals are male as well as female, and there may be understandable feminist objections to making the vacuity of a pierced but comely character a central feature of the narrative. From a narrative perspective, though, the choice makes eminent sense: shallow women are frequently pursued by men who can end up looking more foolish than those women could dream of being. Shallow men, on the other hand, end up primarily as marginal figures in dead-end jobs, or as entertainment executives.

Rose's simple heroine is launched into an appropriately simple picaresque plot. Abandoned by her boyfriend in California, Prytania returns to her native New Orleans--one of whose streets she is named for--to take the only action that makes sense: the completion of an elaborate anaconda tattoo on her arms and back. This eventually entails finding her tattooist Snake, making sure he finishes the job before dying of AIDS, and arranging for his cremation and associated festivities instead of his sister's plans for his Christian burial.

From her homecoming radiate other concentric circles of vacuity. She is pined for by Big Marcus, an Oxford theology dropout whose worldview consists of a profound sense of boredom, resignation to living in New Orleans because "every now and then, something extremely cool happened here," and a consciousness that "centered itself upon romantic love." Ergo, he assists in springing Snake from the AIDS ward of Charity Hospital and later throws in his lot with an uber-Goth implausibly--or all too plausibly--named Necro in order to steal Snake's body from the funeral home.

Prytania is employed by Tomasso, a college-educated and dissolute heir who runs a nightclub and makes experimental music by striking bowls filled with water. For all his advantages, "Tomasso's consciousness centered on the constant of cool." His greatest existential crisis occurs when he is "out-grooved" by Big Marcus's auto and music in a two-car convoy.

All of these characters are interviewed by the putative Author, who is gathering material for an account of Prytania's quest for a completed tattoo. The novel as a whole is framed by an introduction, an epilogue, and excerpts from taped interviews that employ journalism as yet another level of fiction. Rose is the ringmaster of this circus in its entirety, and there is great pleasure in watching him work.

If surface is all these characters know, or all they think there is to know, Rose manages to delineate them with a level of detail that shows compassion as well as wit. Misguided minor as well as major characters work with limited means and try, in their own fallible way, to do the right thing as they see it. Little Marcus, a leather-wearing gay dwarf, tries to break out of self-loathing and abusive relationships in courting the massive and fabulously named drag queen Marilyn, who may not be all that he seems. Sarge, a delusional pseudo-vet whose Vietnam fantasies usually involve impaled heads, sees in each of his scenarios the mission "to take care of my men," who are generally imaginary or already dead. At the end of his walk-on role in the book, "Sarge hacked back the dense foliage in the in the tropical darkness, clearing the way for their escape.”
Give or take a few degrees of latitude, this seems to be what we're all trying to do. In an absurdly polarizing society, the "losers" are condemned to a lifetime of McJobs and the "winners" are corralled into tract mansions and gated communities that they have no time to enjoy; all the while the planet's health remains in question. The woods are dark and deep, if not lovely, and we are a long way from getting out of them. As Nesbitt and Rose show, however, at least we are getting some good stories out of the current mess. If we listen to them closely enough, we might get a clearer idea of what's wrong with our culture, and ourselves, and maybe even see what to do about it.

Smith, J.D. Lost in the Woods. American Book Review. (March-April, 2003): 38-9