For the last month, I've been practicing the phrase, "I used to live
in Boston," but it still feels strange to say it. In two weeks, I'll
put all my stuff in a truck and head south to New York. I'm prepared,
but after eight and a half years, leaving this city isn't going to be
easy, for the peculiar reason that I never intended to stay so long in
the first place. Partly, the problem is that the city itself is so
inhospitable to the very idea of settling in. Everyone complains about
the consistently inconsistent weather in the capital of New England,
but this complaining just symbolizes Boston's single enduring truth:
change without significant difference is the order of the day. Due to
the number of colleges and universities in this so-called American
Athens, a huge percentage of the population is transient; the students
come and go in massive, recurrent waves. The major streets, including
the one on which I live, seem to be dug up only to be created anew
every single summer. And every year, the Boston Red Sox invariably
come out roaring in the spring, only to fade away in August.
Similarly, huge expectations have been raised only to be dashed with
respect to the notorious Big Dig, which will, at some point in the
future, sink the section of Route 95 that runs through downtown Boston
under the ground, and replace it with a stretch of public park. I'm
told that, in expense and ambition, the Big Dig rivals only China's
mammoth Three Gorges project as the largest public works project on
the planet. Naturally, the Big Dig has been mired in controversy and
cost-overruns from the beginning, yet it keeps chugging on,
transforming the city on what seems a daily basis, as auto and
pedestrian traffic is endlessly rerouted and new bridges and tunnels
appear suddenly as if out of nowhere.
Fittingly, the protean city of Boston provides the setting for
much of Fast Eddie, King of the Bees, a first novel by Robert
Arellano that's just out from Akashic Books. Fast Eddie kicks
off Akashic's Urban Surreal series, and if Fast Eddie is any
indication, Akashic's commitment to this series will result in some
gorgeous books, for Fast Eddie is beautifully designed, with
illustrations by Marek Bennett and Lindsay Packer. Arellano, who holds
an MFA from Brown University, where he now teaches writing and
hypertext, is also the author, under the pen name Bobby Rabyd, of the
Web's first interactive novel, Sunshine69, a wildly imaginative
redescription of the historic Altamont free concert at the height of
the Sixties. If Sunshine69 time-tripped backwards toward a
moment of lost utopian promise, Fast Eddie takes place in a
near-future dystopia, a future Boston (known, in Fast Eddie, as
the Beast) that's nevertheless near enough to unsettle this erstwhile
Bostonian.
But this is a bit misleading, because Fast Eddie has more in
common with Oliver Twist than with recent novels, like William
Gibson's Neuromancer, set in a dystopic near-future. For one
thing, despite its glitzy descriptions of the future of just about
everything, Neuromancer still takes itself very serious as a
novel that squats firmly in a certain genre, with a plot and
characters that even Charles Dickens would recognize, even if he were
befuddled by the technology. Not so for Fast Eddie, which does
not so much tell a story as question the whole enterprise of
storytelling — of creating a series of events that unfold
according to an inner necessity that the narrative must slowly
uncover, the way a careful dissection can reveal structure and
function all at once, after the inessential surfaces have been
stripped away.
Fast Eddie is the story is the eponymous main character's
quest, familiar from Oedipus, of finding out where he comes from, and
in the process discovering, or inventing, who he is. "Don't ask me
where I come from," Fast Eddie begins, orphaned and abandoned to
Boston's criminal netherworld. "I myself should never have asked...The
problem is, the question asked me." This reversal typifies most
subsequent developments for Fast Eddie, who must learn to cope with
the wild hairpin turns characteristic of his unsentimental education
in the school of near-future hard knocks, wild twists that occur on
the macro-level of the story as well as (and often most beautifully)
on the micro-level of sentences and transitions in the language of the
story (of which more below).
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