| Articles: Wild Things: Strange Brew (1/3) | ||
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| by Polly Shulman, Mothers Who Think, Salon.com, Oct. 13, 1998 Love and art are the twin redeemers for the hipster heroes and heroines of Francesca Lia Block's young adult novels. Francesca Lia Block writes young adult novels so far out of the mainstream that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Association of Suburban PTAs had banned them from information centers across America. Her youthful heroines and heroes rarely spend much time in school, and they're too busy singing in rock bands, surfing, having babies out of wedlock, communing with ghosts, taking photographs, driving around Los Angeles in vintage convertibles and living happily ever after to bother with homework. In "Weetzie Bat," the first in a series of five novels about an extended L.A. family, the eponymous Weetzie rubs a magic lantern and asks the obliging genie who emerges to provide her and her best friend (a boy named Dirk) with true lovers and a living space. Dirk gets a cute surfer dude named Duck, Weetzie gets a filmmaker named My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk's grandmother leaves them her house and all is bliss until Weetzie decides she needs a baby and My Secret Agent Lover Man refuses to oblige. Without telling him, Weetzie sleeps with Dirk and Duck one evening -- her lover, she reasons, is sure to love the baby when it appears, and the child will have the advantage of three fathers. To Weetzie's surprise, My Secret Agent etc. storms out when she tells him she's pregnant. Eventually he returns, agreeing to accept the baby, Cherokee, as family. Soon after, another infant girl appears on the doorstep -- she's the result of a brief affair My Secret had with a lanky Wiccan while he was gone. Weetzie takes her in and names her Witch Baby. And despite some setbacks (such as when Weetzie's father dies of an overdose), they all get on with the business of living happily ever after, as the genie promised they would. Stories like this may not be wholesome; they are, however, the stuff cult classics are made of, and Block has a passionate following among hip critics. A new novel -- "I Was a Teenage Fairy" (as in thumb-size, supernatural person with wings, not homosexual) -- and a one-volume edition of the Weetzie Bat books are sure to swell the numbers of her fans. The Weetzie collection, "Dangerous Angels," charts the development of this remarkable writer from an enfant terrible a decade ago to a brash yet delicate master. Many readers will be enchanted by the glittering atmosphere Block creates. Here, for example, the younger generation of Weetzie's family has a jam session: "Witch Baby sat at her drums, her purple eyes fierce, her skinny arms pounding out the beat; Angel Juan pouted and swayed as he played his bass, and Raphael sang in a voice like Kahlua and milk, swinging his dreadlocks to the sound of his guitar. Cherokee, whirling with her tambourine, imagined she could see their music like fireworks -- flashing flowers and fountains of light exploding in the air around them." Other readers (including me) may find Block's relentless lyricism as irritating as a neighbor's wind chimes, especially in her earlier books. Her hipness -- or as Weetzie likes to put it, "slinkster cool" -- can also grate. The characters are all glamorously beautiful, and she provides each of them with at least one, more often three or four, talents and creative pursuits. They dance, sing, sew, act, film, paint, write poetry, declaim it -- they try their hands at every imaginable artistic endeavor (except writing young adult novels). Not even minor characters escape: The homeless boy Duck picks up when he's exploring his homosexuality, for example, is an aspiring furniture designer. But irritable readers who stick it out for two or three novels will be rewarded when they reach the later books -- swirling yet meticulously structured collages of resonant symbols and passions we've all felt, particularly as teenagers. |
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