The author of six previous books, McBride has plowed this territory before. The implication is that the world of this narrative is both the one we inhabit and one that is slightly different, a space of imaginative reverie. Lindsay, and Abzug was still a year away from election to the House. “On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Bella Abzug, the flamboyant Jewish congresswoman, was meeting with fundraisers to consider a run for president.” In reality, Armstrong, along with fellow Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, was greeted by Mayor John V. “he Brooklyn Borough President was welcoming Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon,” McBride writes. Like them, he telegraphs his intentions through the use - or better yet, the reinvention - of history, which as “Deacon King Kong” progresses becomes a kind of floating opera, touching but not always overlapping with events as they occurred. But its tinge of absurdity indicates that McBride is operating in the realm of social allegory, a lineage that extends back through generations of writers: Ralph Ellison, Terry Southern, Darius James. It’s a tragicomic moment, marking the way Sportscoat engages (or fails to) with the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |