Review: "The Ecstatic" by Victor LaValle.

Over the past few years, American author Victor LaValle has become one of my favorite writers of genre fiction. His four novels are the perfect mixture of human drama and fantastical elements, the mundane and the macabre and the very emotional with the very scary. At this best he channels writers like Haruki Murakami, whose similar since of strangeness derives from a very human place where loneliness, social isolation and family tragedy manifest into otherworldly creatures, secret societies and that sweet spot where the line between painful reality and ambivalent fantasy is slowly frayed away. I’ve jumped around his books, reading them out of order and this year I came to his first novel, The Ecstatic. It is wildly distinctive with a gonzo energy that makes the nonsensical plot work against all odds, but it lacks the emotional core that made the three novels that followed stick so thoroughly in my memory. That is not to say that there aren’t parts of this book that rank among LaValle’s best. At the center of this novel is the horror-film obsessed Anthony James, a 315 pound 23-year old who has just been kicked out of college. It doesn’t help at all that he falls back into the clutches of his family, which include his mom, whom he might have inherited his possible schizophrenia from, his cantankerous younger sister Nabisase who keeps entering and losing beauty pageants and his Grandma, the most poorly defined character whose personality is made up from her extreme actions. The book is at its best when its plotless, cataloguing Anthony’s experiences with a local loan shark, his strange one night stand with a bookish overweight girl and his time in the cleaning business. It is when the quartet hits the road to accompany Nabisase to a pageant for virgins that book adds unnecessary plot details involving a religious huckster and plans to derail the idea of a beauty pageant. This section drags like mad, but the book makes up for it with an incredible, heartfelt ending that demonstrates why it is both easy and hard to root for the portly Anthony. This debut novel is minor work from an author whose stature in modern literature is only continuing to grow. 

Rating: 4/5