Teenage Bubbles is the daughter of wealthy white parents, goes to a good school, has all the toys a material girl could wish for…and is deeply dissatisfied with just about everything. One morning, annoyed about something or other, she launches into a racist tirade, directed against the family’s African-American maid. This is a poor idea, for the maid knows a thing or two about voodoo, and curses Bubbles with all the mysterious power at her disposal. Bubbles promptly falls into a hallucinatory rabbit hole of grotesque racist and sexual scenarios, exposing her own monstrous racism and that of society in general…until finally she undergoes a bizarre transmogrification…
Right, so, I have to mention that this book is a very, very twisted read. Darius James, an African-American author, holds nothing back in this absolutely bonkers and righteously angry take down of the nebulous, collective monstrosity that is racism. Written in the form of a screenplay, James takes the opportunity to choke every page with bizarre and ferociously disturbing imagery. There are all kinds of sexual and racist violence. Caricatures are given life, and voice, and do all sorts of terrible things to each other, and to Bubbles. The dialogue is strewn with racist epithets, so that even Quentin Tarantino might be inspired to blush. Reader be forewarned…this shit is messed up.
As an experience, how does it hold up? Well it’s…it’s hard to summarize. I do believe James is attempting a sort of portrait in words of the animal of racism itself, as he sees it existing in the collective unconscious of America. It’s…not a pretty picture. A practitioner of voodoo himself, James believes words have literal power (pun intended) and is using them here, I think, to create in the reader…quite potentially the WHITE reader…something approaching the same level of disgust and terror he feels in the confrontation of racism…which, for him, is a ceaseless phenomenon.
There were moments I felt sick, repulsed, and pondered the value of wading through suck sickness. I will say the violence teenage Bubbles is subjected at times smacks of a very different kind of beast than racism, and did bring me very close to dropping the book entirely.
It is, however, the only book I ever read that came with its own shank (NYRB edition). Which is unique. So is this book…a raw, ephemeral shout, a desperate, evil spell to make an even greater evil step back. Me like books.
Me Like Books 