Raised in the shadow of two graffiti legends from New York’s “golden era” of subway bombing, Dondi Vance is less than thrilled to learn his father, Billy Rage, is back after sixteen years on the lam. But the transit cop who ruined Billy’s life and shattered his crew is running for mayor—and must be brought down. Welcome to the Great American Graffiti Novel.
Raised in the shadow of two graffiti legends from New York’s “golden era” of subway bombing, Dondi Vance is less than thrilled to learn his father, Billy Rage, is back after sixteen years on the lam. But the transit cop who ruined Billy’s life and shattered his crew is running for mayor—and must be brought down. Welcome to the Great American Graffiti Novel.
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Overview
Raised in the shadow of two graffiti legends from New York’s “golden era” of subway bombing, Dondi Vance is less than thrilled to learn his father, Billy Rage, is back after sixteen years on the lam. But the transit cop who ruined Billy’s life and shattered his crew is running for mayor—and must be brought down. Welcome to the Great American Graffiti Novel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780142180488 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2013 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.29(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.64(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
"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 . . . Laced with zaniness and cultural bling."
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“A rollicking, frenetic and hilarious jaunt through the (literal and figurative) New York City underworld . . . [that] does for graffiti what Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay did for comic books . . . [Rage is Back] mashes up disparate linguistic registers with an effortlessness that brings to mind Junot Diaz’s perennial narrator, Junior . . . Beneath all the weed and spray paint, it’s a warmhearted story about a son searching for his father and for himself, a trip through the past and present of an American art form.”
—David Lukas, San Francisco Chronicle
“Mansbach’s wild ride will likely earn cult-classic status — and deservedly so . . . In Dondi, Mansbach has created an unforgettable narrator who combines elements of Holden Caulfield, Oscar Wao, and even a hint of Ignatius J. Reilly.”
—Eric Liebetrau, Boston Globe
“Flashing bits of brilliance like a beautifully burned train . . . Mansbach can write with real talent, maybe crazy talent.”
—Kevin Baker, The New York Times Book Review
“A hilarious revenge thriller. . . [that reads] something like watching a Quentin Tarantino film or listening to a Wu-Tang Clan album—perhaps simultaneously. This is a great thing. … Rage Is Back has humor and horror and humanity and is altogether fresh.”
—Kevin Coval, Chicago Tribune
“Exuberant . . . Mansbach’s paean to graffiti art . . . has a wild-style collage form that also ties in plot points involving a hallucinogenic vision-quest, the so-called ‘mole people’ said to live in the city’s tunnels, and time travel.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A muscular ode to New York City’s 1980s art underground . . . Combines a poet's touch with the wild sparks of a subway train speeding through a graffiti-splashed tunnel.”
—Elle Magazine
“Rage Is Back is a gutsy act of cultural nostalgia, full of longing for a vanished New York, a chaotic, colorful city full of graffiti and guerilla art. Adam Mansbach is a fearless, funny, and thoroughly engaging writer.”
—Tom Perrotta,author of Little Children and The Leftovers
“Adam Mansbach's new novel is a trip! A trip through dimensions, drugs, and even an ingenious time machine. Rage is Back is hilarious and insightful, tender and surprising, but best of all it's a tribute to the old heads, the bombers and taggers and the glory of writing in all its forms.”
—Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver and Big Machine
"Rage Is Back is a funny, macho-but-vulnerable coming-of-age-story. It’s seeped in New York nostalgia and narrated in bright and vulgar prose that succeeds in hinting at no small quantity of swagger and soul. As Dondi says, ‘it’s not easy to talk from your heart and out your ass at the same time.’ Delightfully, Rage Is Back manages to do both."
—Daily Beast
“A bracingly funny book [that] rekindles the golden age of graffiti.”
—Connie Ogle, Miami Herald
"A cacophonous love letter to the old dirty, pre-gentrified New York."
—New York Post
“A fierce and funny thrill ride through the train yards and back streets of the graffiti underground. Mansbach writes with splendid rhythm and intensity.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“A rambunctious ride through graffiti culture, filled with magical moments and outlandish situations . . . Like Tarantino, Mansbach has an ear for hip-hop.”
—Charles Ealy, Austin American-Statesman
“Unfolding like a fever dream of an impossible return to graffiti-era New York, Mansbach’s Rage Is Back delivers a mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes and villains, and is already being called “the great American graffiti novel.” A must-read for the literate hip-hop head.”
—OkayPlayer
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
In 1987, Billy Rage was the most celebrated graffiti artist in New York City, leader of the Immortal Five crew and archenemy of NYPD Vandal Squad Officer Anastacio Bracken. After a fatal encounter with Bracken deep in the tunnels of New York’s subway system, Rage fled the city, leaving behind a slain friend, a mourning graffiti scene, and a baby boy, Kilroy Dondi Vance. Rage Is Back by Adam Mansbach brings Rage’s feud with Bracken into 2005, chronicling the conclusion of the two men’s battle for New York and the father–son relationship that is drawn into and deeply altered by the fight.
The now–teenaged Dondi, kicked out of his home and out of his prestigious prep school, is living off the generosity of friends after another battle with his mother. As aimless and frustrated as he is creative and smart, Dondi is bitter over Rage’s absence and burdened by the reputation of his mysterious, legendary father. When word spreads that Rage has returned and is marking his presence in the city with tribal chalk drawings scrawled on subway tunnel walls, both Dondi and Bracken—now chief of the Metropolitan Transit Authority—take notice.
In hallucinogenic first–person prose filled with wild, fascinating digressions, opinions, and the history of the graffiti scene, the young Dondi tells a story that is part urban fiction, part youthful fantasy—big city cynicism dosed with the extraordinary. Dondi is a compelling, complicated narrator, embodying the contradictory nature of teenage boys; he is by turns wry, self–deprecating, bold, and tender, Holden Caulfield by way of Brooklyn and one of the most nuanced young urban voices to arrive in a long time.
Soon Rage’s intentions in returning are clear: expose Bracken’s murderous past and thwart his run for mayor of the city Rage loves. He and the remaining members of the Immortal Five plan the greatest graffiti heist imaginable, drawing artists from around the world. In the span of a few hours, they aim to cover every subway car in the city with graffiti, spraying the name of the friend Bracken killed over and over again and looping a message to commuters over the PA system, detailing Bracken’s guilt. Rage is determined to destroy Bracken’s career—or destroy himself trying.
Rage Is Back is a love letter to the heart of New York, and the graffiti artists, small–time gangsters, and neighborhoods unknown to those outside the five boroughs of the city. Mansbach’s novel, written in the vernacular of the graffit community, provides a glimpse into a vibrant and exciting world and is certain to become one of the classic New York City novels.
ABOUT ADAM MANSBACH
Adam Mansbach’s books include the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Go the F**k to Sleep, the California Book Award—winning novel The End of the Jews, and the cult classic Angry Black White Boy. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and The Believer, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
A CONVERSATION WITH ADAM MANSBACH
Q. In the acknowledgments you thank a number of actual graffiti artists. How did you forge connections with this community?
Over many years. I wrote this book as an outgrowth of those relationships, rather than the other way around. When I got into hip–hop, around 1986, all the artistic elements were of a piece: the verbal (rhyming), the sonic (deejaying), the kinetic (b–boying), and the visual (graff). I was mainly an MC and a DJ, but you had to be conversant in all those forms and understand the ways they connected aesthetically. So I wrote a little bit—took tags, tried my hand at piecing under the names JUST and EASEL.
I wasn’t a natural at graffiti, but I became a connoisseur. The way it dealt with flow and rupture, the intricate rules and mores of the art and the competition, the interplay between creation and destruction—all that fascinated me. And graff writers were usually the most interesting hip–hoppers: the weirdos, the mad scientists, the guerillas, the theorists, the addicts. They’d invented this thing that made them outlaws, that they pursued at their own risk, strictly for fame and satisfaction. There’s a beautiful purity to it. So I made myself a student of its colorful, often apocryphal history, and got to know as many writers as I could, including legends like PHASE 2 and ZEPHYR and PART ONE.
By the time I conceived of this book, those friendships were solid. Before I started writing, I remember, I took KET ONE out to lunch and told him I needed to know whether it would be possible to paint every train in the NYC subway system in one night, and if so, how it could be done. He leaned across the table and said, “I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years.”
Q. It seems that graffiti has existed for as long as there has been written culture; there are even ancient Roman examples of graffiti, often of the type found in a bathroom stall. What accounts for the enduring appeal of writing graffiti?
The purity of the statement. It’s literature in its rawest form: a simple declaration of existence, adorned and armored and fractured and stylized in every imaginable way. It’s no coincidence that modern graffiti culture developed around the name, or that the practitioners call themselves writers. Graffiti is narrative; it tells a story, if you know where to look.
Q. Dondi isn’t shy about sharing opinions on actual people and events. For example, the book Tuesdays with Morriereceives a few less than flattering comments. Were you concerned that you might offend anyone?
No. I’m writing in a voice, and the novel succeeds or fails on the authenticity and humor and heart of that voice. Dondi is a sharp, shit–talking eighteen–year–old stoner, and I was having too much fun to rein him in at all. Generally speaking, I think honesty of the sort that underwrites good literature is incompatible with worrying about causing offense. Plus, Mitch Albom’s probably not gonna read this book.
Q. From the first page, the novel is written in the vernacular of the graffiti crew, and the reader either understands it, appreciates it, and follows it or he doesn’t. Was there ever a concern that the language might be an impediment for some readers?
I was only concerned with getting the voice right. And I don’t see it as particularly inaccessible—I mean, it’s English, and it’s grammatically correct. Yes, Dondi mashes up slang and high cultural classicism, so maybe some readers won’t get the Greek mythology references and others won’t know some hip–hop touchstones. But that kind of easy, flowing multilinguistic pastiche is how he gets down—how a whole lot of people I know get down. His signposts are as legitimate and mainstream as any other set, they’re just underrepresented in literature. The way I was taught to approach books at my fancy Ivy League college is that if you don’t understand something, you do the work of figuring it out. You look up the obscure reference, or the Spanish word, and you learn something. Language is changing all the time, after all. Am I ranting? I feel like I’m ranting. I’ll stop now.
Q. New York City is more than the setting for the novel—it’s a mythic presence; the novel could not take place in any other city. Why does New York hold this sway over people?
Because it’s a festering, majestic shithole full of compressed energy and dreams and tension and innovation. At the population density of Manhattan, you could fit the world’s population into the state of Texas. Put people from all over the world on top of each other like that and some fly shit is bound to pop off. In terms of this book, New York is the nexus of graffiti culture, the birthplace of hip–hop. There’s an exceptionalism that goes with that—sometimes it sours into provincialism, but often it just gives New Yorkers an unmatched wit and swagger.
Q. In the 1970s and 1980s, New York was a dark and foul place, riddled with crime, urban squalor, and, of course, graffiti. Some people, including those in the novel, feel that this period was the “true” New York, as opposed to what they perceive as the gentrified, sanitized New York of today. On pages 216-217, Dondi admits seeing both sides of this issue but declines to argue for either. What is your opinion?
It’s important not to romanticize the governmental neglect, institutional racism, and other insidious factors that created the climate you’re talking about. The circumstances out of which graffiti and hip–hop rose were deplorable, and represent failed policies on a municipal and a national level. That said, to position gentrification as the opposite creates a false dichotomy. There are losers and winners in gentrification, and the losers are the same people who lost in the ’70s—the poor and disenfranchised. We have to look at whether gentrification lifts everybody’s quality of life, or just makes a neighborhood uninhabitable by its longtime residents. Ditto the “sanitized” New York: that process mirrors a national trend toward record–setting levels of incarceration. We’ve moved from the politics of abandonment to the politics of containment, but neither one is worth celebrating.
Q. When describing the time–traveling properties of the apartment stairs, Dondi says that if the readers are hoping for magical realism, then they should move on to a different book. However, magical realism is usually defined as a narrative style in which fantastical elements appear in a reality–based context. Doesn’t that description fit Dondi’s supernatural staircase or the possibility of supernatural forces in the subway tunnels?
Yeah, but he still rejects the term—because he considers it corny, and “literary,” and his life is real. Personally, I was interested in thinking about what a contemporary, New York magic realism would look like. You know, we read Márquez and understand that his magic realism is grounded in the religion of Colombia, or we read Murakami and understand that his version is based in Japanese myth and culture . . . but we don’t have any such framework in this country. So for me, what it looks like is that the incidents of “magic” don’t go unremarked upon. Rather, they have to be defended and debated, and when you tell somebody about them, the reaction is usually like, “get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.”
Q. Are there any classic New York films or novels that influenced you when writing Rage Is Back?
I’d say that the biggest literary influences on this novel were Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks, 2666 by Roberto Bolano, and maybe Treasure Island. But the music of New York City—from classic hip–hop to Nuyorican salsa to jazz—is always with me in an important way, no matter what I’m working on.
Q. Late in the novel, Dondi describes the process of writing his book as “Fake it till you make it, as they say. Keep sitting in that chair” (page 288). Is that your own approach to writing?
The “keep sitting in the chair” part, for sure. I’m happy to say that I don’t feel like I’m faking it anymore. Although that probably means I’m faking it.
Q. You write in a number of different genres, including poetry and your bestselling children’s book parody, Go the F**k to Sleep. Is there a particular medium that you feel most comfortable in? Were you expecting that the parody would be the success that it was? What was that experience like?
Shit, just when I was thinking I could get out of this without talking about Go the Fuck to Sleep. No, I wasn’t expecting that book to take off and sell a million copies; I was just tickled that I got to publish it. The experience was crazy; I literally did eight hours of interviews every single day for six months, and I’ve got far too many wacky stories to get into here, from the New Zealand censorship battle to my face–off with Dr. Ferber.
At heart, I’ll always be a novelist, and an MC. But the nice thing is that compared to the heavy lifting of a novel—the time, the commitment, the word count, the world–creation—everything else feels relatively light . . . which is not to say that I’m good at it, just that it takes a lot out of me. But I’ve been doing more screenwriting lately, and I find that a joy. Poetry is always fun. Genre fiction, which is new to me, is a blast, too. I like to work within parameters sometimes—the strictures of meter and rhyme, or the imperative to end each chapter with a cliffhanger—because it’s a fun challenge to create inside these constraints.
Q. What is your next project? Are you working in different genres simultaneously?
I have a supernatural thriller called The Dead Run coming out in July—my first genre novel. I’m supposed to do a second, too; that one is called Blood Alcohol Content. I’ve got about three movie projects in various stages of development, too, including a script I got to workshop last year at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and another that Jim Jarmusch is executive producing. And this week, a script I wrote for a pro–Obama video called Wake the Fuck Up will shoot—Samuel L. Jackson is starring in it. That will probably be out by the time you read this.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS