The name might not sound familiar, but you know Adam Mansbach’s work. He’s that guy who sold 9 gazillion copies of “Go the [expletive] to Sleep” and made every parent in America groan, “Why didn’t I write that?”
Yes, it was a fluke, but a very funny fluke that went viral among exhausted moms and dads and climbed up the Amazon bestseller list months before publication. The success of that profane children’s book (soon — somehow — to be a feature film from Fox 2000) brings him the kind of prominence his previous books never enjoyed. And what better way to capitalize on all those expectant eyes than with a tale about urban life’s most attention-grabbing communication: graffiti?
“Rage Is Back” won’t become a staple at ironic baby showers, but Mansbach has clearly had a play date with Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz, and his fresh, witty novel is one that hip readers will relish once the kids have finally, mercifully, nodded off. Laced with zaniness and cultural bling, it’s a nostalgic tribute to the glory days of street art, back when New York City had character, when those bubbly letters shouted from rambling subway cars and people loved to spot their favorite artists.
The story opens in 2005, long after James Q. Wilson advised replacing every broken window and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sanitized Times Square for Kansas tourists desperate to see the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber-Disney co-production on ice. Our ricocheting narrator is Kilroy Dondi Vance, “a mocha teenager” with a funkadelic soul. He warns us early on that he’s always high, “but in a charming, articulate way.” Fair enough — he is pretty charming, but his drug use is what gets him expelled from a tony Manhattan prep school that he refers to as the “Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s a Comin’ Academy.” (He attended on the “Let’s Give a Clever Young Colored Boy a Chance to Transcend His Race Scholarship.”) Exasperated, his hot-tempered mother has thrown him out of the house, and so, homeless and with his college prospects scuttled, he falls back on sponging off old friends and dealing pot.
There’s no resisting this endearing stoner, “a nerd with swagger,” as he riffs on everything from Madison Avenue to yuppies’ racial anxiety. The opening pages stretch out like the chaotic New York City subway map, but the story resolves into a quirky tale of comeuppance involving Dondi’s errant father, Billy Rage.
In the late 1980s, Rage was a member of the Immortal Five, a world-famous graffiti gang that delighted New Yorkers but infuriated the NYPD Vandal Squad. “What you call mass email,” Dondi says, “my parents called hitting trains.” A maniacal policeman named Officer Bracken chased the gang down and shot one of its members in cold blood on the night Dondi was born. Crazy with grief, Rage protested the killing by painting accusations all over town, but Bracken struck back with a massive manhunt and a multimillion-dollar fine. With nowhere left to hide, Rage finally fled to Mexico, abandoning Dondi and his mother.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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