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?
Dancing in the street, purple pool-ring like an octopus about his waist, stubby inflated tentacles bobbing to the music from the speakers clipped to his rainbow suspenders, lyrics striding over a slinking beat, fuck the lease, I’m on my knees, he’s an atheist, I give him reason to believe, God bless, tiny white lights strung about his shoulders against the falling night, and glow sticks of every prismal color lopped about his purple capotain, stole his heart cause my cheeks thick as thieves. Half a dozen men and a woman in lederhosen and Tyrolean hats, and cradled in their arms the brassy curls of tubas, a euphonium, a sousaphone, Trebel Frei, says the sternly Gothic blackletter on the white cap over the big bell end of it, someone cheers. A squad of transparent umbrellas, the poles of them neon tubes of actinic pinks and yellows and greens twirled about to more applause. “Friends!” an amplified voice from speakers somewhere oddly distant, pointed away, “Neighbors! Honored guests!” and “Here we go,” says the man with the contrabass bugle, “Visitors from far and wide!” that booming voice, “Gracing our not-too-chilly and only somewhat rainy waterfront! Welcome, as we light up the Rose Festival with the one, the only, the best to ever do it, the greatest west of the Mississippi, welcome here and now, tonight, to the CareOregon! Starlight! Parade!”
“Okay,” she says, and sets a clipboard on the table between them, “okay. So I’m gonna read you your rights, and when I’m done, you’re gonna sign that, to show you understand.”
“I don’t need any rights,” he says.
“First, you have the right to remain silent.”
“I don’t want to be silent!”
She holds up a hand. “Bear with me. We’ll get through this. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you, in a court of law.”
“There’s no need!” he almost wails, “I came here to confess!”
“I think he stuck the landing. This was good, damn good.”
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
