LaValle offers us Ricky — a junkie who has been burned by life — and delivers him to God. Grace finds us as we dine with Victor and we devour his characters for their carcasses which provide spiritual nourishment.
The cast of characters in Big Machine are right off the urban funny farm. Each of them is ripe with flavorful personalities, but it takes LaValle to prepare them with his special variety of mischief. Like frog legs which don’t make their way to the urban menu, the author dreams tragedy into the last supper.
After sharing coffee and beer with LaValle at Pastis in NYC, it was clear that he planned to continue honing his craft. I imagined him vexed by demons while simultaneously experiencing jubilation in his mind with each stroke of the the keyboard and turn of the page.
There are coffee stains on my copy of Big Machine and bent pages for reviewed and studied lines that held my attention as in “… my father died alone.” No more needed to be said. Like a hip-hop literary genius, LaValle crushes the story and writes rhyme-like phrases that garner fans like Mos Def who named a recent album for LaValle’s first novel, Ecstatic.
Not very often does Black literature hear a voice, that can transfuse the blood of Chester Himes and Iceberg Slim to course through the long sinewy fingers of a human, but LaValle mutates as he has been bitten by the devil and kissed by Jesus. When you read this book, the loss of family and associates feels so conflictingly good that each passing forms a new life. — munson steed
