Black and White and Read All Over? George P. Pelecanos, King
Suckerman, Serpents Tail/Mask Noir. ISBN 1-85242-610-1. pp.
265. £8.99.
Former armed-robber and bad-ass black man Wilton Cooper teams
up with terminal-wigger redneck, Bobby Roy 'B. R.' Clagget
and two black country-boys, the Thomas brothers. The path of
this dangerous band crosses with that of black record-shop
owner, Marcus Clay and his dope-dealing Greek buddy, Dimitri
Karras, with grave consequences.
As well as the providing the title of this latest offering
from George P. Pelecanos, King Suckerman is also the title of
a [fictional] nineteen-seventies 'blaxploitation' flick about
a pimp--but 'not any old pimp. The baddest player there ever
was' (p. 14). The King Suckerman film is not so much
blaxploitation as an Iceberg Slim-style tale of the grimmer
aspects of black urban life, of which one of the novel's
black characters remarks, 'I bet some white man wrote that
movie; produced it, too' (p. 15). This comment serves to
raise the question of the status of Pelecanos's text, which
is itself an example of a non-black writer representing black
experience. Is Pelecanos's novel just another piece of
blaxploitation, or is it something more than a wigger-text
simply leeching on black style? Similar questions have been
raised about the use of popular culture, black style and the
representation of black characters in the films of Quentin
Tarantino.
King Suckerman invites comparison with Tarantino's films not
just because of the centrality of popular culture, black or
otherwise--for example: popular music, film, drugs, fashion,
television--in the text and in the characters' lives; and not
just because of the portrayal of violence and vernacular
speech (particularly, perhaps, the emotive terms
'motherfucker' and 'nigger'), all of which are ways in which
comparisons might be drawn between this Pelecanos novel and
the Tarantino ouevre.
One of the more interesting aspects of this Pelecanos novel,
and one of the more interesting aspects of Tarantiono's work,
is the narrative structure, the way in which the story is
told. Both Pelecanos and Tarantino adopt the story-telling
technique of cutting between apparently discrete, disparate,
plot-lines which are brought together, carefully crafted into
a complex weave of differing points of view. The disorienting
shifts in time that characterise Tarantino's narrative
style--re-running the same scene from a different point of
view--are also employed by Pelecanos. For example, a scene
might take place which unfolds as if seen from one
character's point-of-view. The reader completes the scene,
only to be taken back over it, but from a different
point-of-view. While it would be interesting to see how a
film version of King Suckerman might be scripted by
Tarantino, that is not to be; there is however a film of King
Suckerman already in production, starring Sean "Puffy" Combs
(aka Puff Daddy).
King Suckerman marks something of a turning-point for
Pelecanos. It is not, however, a turning point of quite the
same order of magnitude as, say, Walter Mosley's Always
Outnumbered Always Outgunned (also published in the UK by
Serpents Tail). Mosley's Always Outnumbered Always Outgunned
marks a break with a familiar series character and shows
Mosley, the writer of several Easy Rawlins novels, maturing
and exploring different registers and different techniques.
The same can be said--up to a point--of King Suckerman. It
shows Pelecanos exploring different registers and different
narrative techniques. In this sense Pelecanos is showing
signs of maturing as a writer; but, entertaining and
well-crafted as this novel is, the lavish praise that is
routinely heaped upon him for the frankly rather vapid
Stefanos series still seems a little premature.
One of the most grating aspects of Pelecanos's style is the
way in which it is like what French sociologist Jean
Baudrillard calls a simulacra: a hyperreal simulation, a
perfect copy of an original that never existed--hence, one
suspects, the gushing reviews and the frequent comparisons to
Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and, more recently, Jim
Thompson, that are blurbed across the covers of Pelecanos's
novels.
That said, Pelecanos does seem now to have gotten away from
creating the sense that he is trying too hard to establish
both his own and Nick Stefanos's credentials, which permeates
the earlier narratives. King Suckerman offers welcome relief
from that feeling of writing-as-continual-performance, that
gosh, look-at-me/isn't-it-great-to-be-looked-at-ness that
encumbers the Stefanos novels. But while King Suckerman is a
great improvement over Pelecanos's earlier novels, there is
still some slack in the text. For example, the baggy prose
that constitutes chapters six through to nine could be much
crisper: the present 42 pages could be pared down to fifteen
or twenty pages, with the effect that the pacing becomes much
tighter.
Nor has Pelecanos been bold enough to leave behind the
certainty (not to say unit sales and easy praise?) of the
Stefanos series this time out. King Suckerman is something of
a half-way house between a bold new venture and a 'prequel'
to the Stefanos novels. The young Nick Stefanos is shown in
his early days as a dope-head domestic electrical goods
salesman in Nutty Nathan's. In attempting to make King
Suckerman serve as a prequel to the Stefanos novels,
Pelecanos shows that the line between 'consistency' and
'repetition' is a thin one which, here at least, Pelecanos
appears to follow with some uncertainty.
In the first Nick Stefanos novel, A Firing Offence, for
example, Stefanos walks 'down the noisy wooden steps to the
stock room. The musty odour of damp cardboard met me as I
descended the stairs' (p. 22) while in King Suckerman,
'Karras went down a shaky set of wooden stairs. The musty
odour of damp cardboard hit him as he stepped onto a concrete
floor littered with warranty cards and cigarette butts' (p.
155).
In A Firing Offence, 'McGinnes pulled a film canister and a
small brass pipe out of his pocket and shook some pot out of
the vial' (p. 22). In King Suckerman, 'McGinnes ... took a
film canister and a small brass pipe from his pocket and
shook some pot into the bowl' (p. 159).
Stefanos describes himself in A Firing Offence as 'usually
wearing some kind of rock-and-roll T-shirt, tight Levi's
cuffed cigarette style, Sears workboots on my feet' (p. 22)
while in King Suckerman 'Stefanos
[was] wearing Levi's cigarette style, one turn-up at the cuff
[...] a pair of Sears work boots and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt
(p. 156).
Even though these are the same characters in the same
location, the similarity in the descriptive prose goes beyond
the call of consistency and comes, on the basis of the
evidence here, uncomfortably close to laziness or
self-plagiarism.
The themes of fatherhood and male-relationships give King
Suckerman an extra dimension. The main male characters lack
the steadying influence of a father figure. Heroes Marcus
Clay and Dimitri Karras are men without fathers as, of
course, is Nick Stefanos. Their relationships with women are
often obstacles to, or tests of, the depth of their
'real' relationships with other men.
While drug-dealer Eddie Marchetti is a 'bad father' to Vivian
Lee, his symbolic daughter, his associate, Clarence Tate, is
a caring, nurturing father to his own 'motherless' daughter.
Bad-guy B. R. Clagget has a savage bully of a step-father in
the place of a 'real' father which
'explains' his deviancy. Mega-baddie Wilton Cooper cuts
across the lives of all these men like an awful
father-figure, the Titan who must answer to his sons.
For all its right-on style, King Suckerman retains a sense of
conservatism and there are some scenes of cloying moralism.
Marcus Tate, for example, often speaks with the novel's moral
voice, openly courting regeneration by continually
demonstrating self-awareness and regretting his wrongdoing.
Even pussy-hound Karras exercises some moral judgement with
respect to his drug-dealing and his sexual inclinations.
Episodes of male-bonding intersperse the action scenes of a
novel that can also be seen as a tale of cliched masculine
loyalty.
Male sexuality is something of a cliche here too: the
good-guys are shown as 'healthily' heterosexual and get to
grapple with the more profound aspects of relationships with
women; the baddies are homosexual or inept heterosexuals
(suggesting an equivalence between social deviancy and
'sexual deviancy') while the naive young white-boys seem to
spend a disproportionate amount of story-time polishing
Onan's flag-pole.
As noted, the film King Suckerman plays like an Iceberg Slim
story--the tale of an unrelenting black pimp, mean and hard
on his hoes, fucked over by The Way Things Are. For
record-shop employee Rasheed, the film tells it like it is.
The film also prompts Wilton Cooper to buy a copy of Iceberg
Slim's Pimp for B. R.--telling him, 'most of what you saw in
that movie ... they took that shit straight from Ice, man.
Read that and you'll know what's really going on' (p.
77).
Is there really any point then in Pelecanos bringing his
formula and polish to black experience when, thanks to
Iceberg Slim (and the Payback Press), it's available in its
raw state? Perhaps the difference is that Iceberg Slim offers
an authentic version of black experience--for characters such
as Wilton Cooper and Rasheed, who know how it is--while
Pelecanos writes for the white boys: the Dewey Schmidts, the
Jimmy Castles and the Jerry Baluzys.
Pelecanos is improving as a writer and a stylist--the
reservations discussed above notwithstanding. There's still a
lot of promise in Pelecanos. Let's hope he hasn't peaked
yet.
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