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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Future Boston: Robert Arellano's Fast Eddie, King of the Bees : Page 1, 2, 3 On the other hand, if Fast Eddie, King of the Bees refuses the wider kind of satisfaction, it more than rewards the reader who's willing to attend to other things. Wordplay, for instance. Fast Eddie is full of exuberant linguistic hijinks, a joyful linguistic excess that's hugely refreshing. Such suggestive wordplay is typical of Arellano, who used it to great effect in Sunshine69. Although Arellano now and then lets himself get away with a groaner (e.g., "All sniffed their snifters, sobbed into their bottles, and glugged their mugs. There wasn't a dry martini in the house.") his ear for this admittedly somewhat subtle stuff strikes me as both true and inventive. Moreover, while the resonances with the nineteenth-century novel, particularly Dickens', are clear, with Eddie's makeshift Fagins and Magwitches, the novel's also vividly evokes the here-and-now. Arellano never lets you forget that this is Boston, not London; East Beast is not EC1. All the particulars are right, from "the smoke-scented dusk of the Beast in springtime" to Arellano's descriptions of typical Massachusetts motorists (there's a reason everyone else in New England calls us "Massholes" on the road) to the "dreary, inky light" of Crossroads Tavern, where one might, indeed, feel "the beginning of a beautiful dependency" with a single pint, and where a madman might burst in shouting "with all the ceremony of a psychopathic slug." Actually, madmen in the Beast do just that — particularly after a Red Sox game. Boston is the right setting for a story about origins: it's the home of the Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, of Paul Revere's famous ride; it's the cradle of the American Revolution and, as such, the furnace of a national idea. But, well, there is the idea, and there is the reality. You can commit to the ideas of revolution or industry or urban renewal, in love with promise, but there's a difference between making promises and just being promising. Maybe I never really committed to Boston either; when I moved to Boston in 1993, I had no intention of staying for so long. Yet, here I am. How did that happen? It's here, perhaps, that I feel the most sympathy for Arellano's perplexed, hapless Eddie: it's not so much that I'm asking the question, but that the question asks me. Boston: the scab I keep picking, the story that just goes on and on. Further reading online: Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com After eight and a half years in Boston, Diane Greco has moved to Brooklyn. Her affection for the Red Sox is, however, undiminished.
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