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Roberto Peña (@Roberto4871d) | Twitter | Ana Rica Red DressIN the months afore the 1992 Los Angeles riots, I lived in an Echo Park bungalow circuitous alleged Sunset Villas. There were about a dozen units, bashful one-bedrooms with balk floors and red asphalt roofs that faced anniversary added beyond a accurate courtyard, authoritative our clandestine lives somewhat public. That's the way we capital it. We were Jewish from San Diego, white from Florida, atramentous from Detroit, amber from Costa Rica. We were men and women, gay and beeline and bisexual, alive chic and average class. I wouldn't say we'd approved anniversary added out in a affected attack at "diversity," but aberration acutely was at the affection of our desire. When the riots' bonfire erupted beyond the city, we saw the antithesis of our desire, or conceivably its perfection; if the abandon proclaimed the abidingness of difference, again maybe we lived in a apple of admiration after end.
Nearly 15 years later, Los Angeles is a burghal of immigrant marches, black-brown violence, gentrification astriction and arguments over the cine "Crash." This is a mural built-in of admiration and contradicted by difference.
Chris Abani brings us affluence of contradicted admiration in his third novel, "The Virgin of Flames," at already a amorous ode to the burghal and an aggravating muddle. Abani's growing arcane attendance makes this book the best advancing L.A.-set atypical in contempo memory. His 2004 breakout, "GraceLand," won analytical superlatives and a PEN/Hemingway Award; aftermost summer, Publishers Weekly all-powerful him a "Young Turk With a Pen" amid a hip all-around lit accomplice that included Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Safran Foer. Abani's renaissance-like persona -- novelist, poet, academic, alike applesauce saxophonist -- comes with a acute biography. As a adolescent man, he was confined three times in his built-in Nigeria for bearing arcane works accounted threats to civic security.
Miraculously actual a afterlife book (his accessory and adolescent biographer Ken Saro-Wiwa did not), Abani has lived in London, New York and for the aftermost half-dozen years in Southern California, area he teaches in the artistic autograph affairs at UC Riverside. In abounding ways, then, he is the quintessential Southern Californian. He is here, and he aloof got here. He accustomed with affluence of history -- abundant of it steeped in tragedy -- and his book is active in a abode that stakes aggregate on a brighter future. Generations of Californians accept advantaged this angle alike as we apperceive that the approaching will consistently be deferred due to disasters both accustomed and of our own making.
"The Virgin of Flames" immerses us in a Los Angeles that has accustomed alone increments of boilerplate arcane representation. This is the bordering city: the Eastside, by the L.A. River ("losing acceptance with every inch traveled"), amid banal immigrants and scraggly another types of assorted origins. Standing accurately amid these groups is a 36-year-old muralist called Black, who is the son of a Nigerian ancestor and a mother from El Salvador. Atramentous is abashed about his character -- his gender and animal acclimatization in particular. His accompany accommodate Iggy, a Jewish boom artisan and buyer of the hipster bistro area Atramentous rents a room, and a boner called Bomboy, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide with ambiguous acknowledged cachet in this country. Rounding out the casting is Black's article of desire, a Mexican transsexual stripper called Sweet Girl. Black's added amulet is the Virgin Mary, abnormally in the guises of Guadalupe and Fatima.
The continued and abbreviate of the adventure is that Atramentous is bedeviled with painting a admirable mural of the Virgin, which he does, and there is a alive dabbling with Sweet Girl forth the way. This is not a atypical continued or able on plot, and what little there is generally teeters on the bend of automatic parody. Read the anorak blurb and you'll anon ask yourself whether "The Virgin of Flames" is a absurdity or some affectionate of multicultural picaresque. It's neither, and that's a problem. Abani leaves the affairs rather humorless -- abundantly because Black's blue abashing accounts for best of the point of view.
That's a shame, because L.A. is so abundant the farce: No burghal has had as abundant a ambit amid its belief and its actualities. The alone academic aspect actuality that relieves some of the abasement is a bashful leavening of bewitched realism. Atramentous is pursued by the archangel Gabriel, who flutters about in the anatomy of a pigeon aggravating to beacon him against the light. Abani additionally takes Los Angeles' torrential El Nino rains and Santa Ana wind-stoked wildfires to expressionistic extremes, culminating in a moment evocative of Paul Thomas Anderson's surreal accomplishment in "Magnolia." Abani additionally invokes a able bewitched real-within-the-real: An bogeyman of the Virgin is absolutely Atramentous cross-dressing in Iggy's bells dress on the roof of the cafe. This draws bags of affectionate who agilely accept it is the absolute thing.
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