City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and union meetings are beseiged by ghost bicycles.
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees.
The book established Whitehead’s intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn’t too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author’s choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all?
An empty paper cup rattles between two funneling flanges behind a clear plastic door, as machinery hidden within the cabinet grinds to humming life. There’s a prolonged hiss. Enjoy a delicious cup of coffee! says the sign above the door, a steaming ceramic cup nestled amidst mounds of rich dark beans. She jumps when something spurts into the cup, the whole cabinet gurgles, and a thin but steady stream fills it until hiss, spit, the gurgle stops, the grinding hum, she blinks.
“It’s done,” he says. “You can, ah,” he crouches, grey tracksuit flapping open, jerks up the plastic door to carefully, gripped by the rim, pull out the steaming cup. Offers it up to her, his dwindling hair clipped close, an abstract frown, “Go on,” he says. “Take it.”
She does, wincing. Switches to her other hand gripped carefully by the rim, sucking air through her teeth as she shakes the heat from her fingertips. White-gold hair unsprung from an otherwise ruthless queue a snarly halo in the light. A tentative sip, another wince, “This is terrible,” she says.
“It’s coffee,” he says, getting to his feet. “And hot.”
The room is dim, cramped, overwhelmed by the enormous bed set at an angle, away from any wall, safety rails engaged to either side, the head of it ramped up in a semi-sitting position, foot of it lowered, a rumpled throne surrounded by monitors on carts, pumps, stands laden with drip bags, watchful courtiers clustered about. He’s sat in the one chair, before a curtained window, poking at the phone in his hand, “Mackenzie missed her connection,” he says, hushed.
“What?” she says, hunched on the only other chair in the room, paper cup in her hands, almost empty, now.
“Her flight from Denver.” He looks up. “She won’t be here till after midnight.”
She looks down to the cup, back up to him. “Okay,” she says.
“…like Little, Big crossed with Revolutionary Girl Utena.”
“It’s what urban fantasy might be now, if it’d gone in different directions.”
“The characters are both subtly human and bold rock-opera caricatures and why do they both work—”
