War
Boy
by
Kief Hillsbery
(William
Morrow, 335 pages, $24)
Kief Hillsbery
reads at Powell's on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.,
238-1668. 7:30 pm Wednesday, June 7.
War Boy is the story of Radboy, a 14-year-old deaf
skateboarder who sheds his violent family and hitches up
with a group of outsiders heading for San Francisco. Radboy
quickly comes of age on the road, realizing that he's not
only queer but a budding political anarchist as well.
Kief Hillsbery's fine first novel is written as the first-person
narrative of Radboy himself. His is a febrile, deeply interior
voice like those of Benjy Compson's in Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury and Emily Stilson in Arthur Kopit's
Wings: marginalized and silenced lives packed with
unquiet thoughts. Radboy's language is memorized lines from
books and lyrics colliding full-on with the slang of youth,
creating a singular poetry that's never bowed before the
conventions of speech: "And then it all goes slo-mo for
me as I clench my teeth and crouch for the grab feeling
the sharp chill of the salt air between my fingers and there's
the shining city and the surging gray-green water and the
perfect arc of cables thick as boxcars sweeping toward the
sun."
But, interestingly for someone who is deaf, music plays
an important part in Radboy's life. His thoughts are stocked
with fragments of song lyrics, innocent of others' interpretations.
He viscerally understands music as it beats around him.
In the span of his life that the novel covers, Radboy's
mind comes under the influence of a particular band: Sleater-Kinney.
"I was asking myself what Radboy's favorite band would
be if he could hear," Hillsbery told WW, "and then
I started listening to Sleater-Kinney's Call the Doctor,
and it opened up all these vistas for me." So much so that
Hillsbery marks each of his 12 chapters with one of the
12 songs from Call the Doctor as epigraphs. In fact,
his chapters follow the order of the album's songs, with
only one variant, "Good Things." "I wanted to save the song
to end the book," says Hillsbery. "It seemed right."
Hillsbery's Radboy has a brush with kismet when he meets
the band (unnamed) at a concert. Handed a sheaf of their
lyrics, Radboy pores over the words and finds they have
a profound impact on the voraciously sampling voice in his
mind.
"I thought of Radboy as being like a DJ," Hillsbery said.
"A DJ of words." Radboy possesses a precocious word-hoard,
eagerly sponging up any new term or phrase that comes his
way. While prowling a Webster's to try and define "camp,"
he comes across "camorra," which immediately marks a change
in his political radicalism.
Though the Sleater-Kinney connection has been shamelessly
touted by publicity and press, Hillsbery started his book
long before the group made the hot lights. "A friend at
Evergreen College told me about these fantastic women who
had formed a band," said Hillsbery, a graduate of Evergreen
himself. "I was already into the book, before the idea came
to join their lyrics to Radboy's life."
But there are other cultural forces that have a bearing
on Radboy, from Edward Abbey to Woody Guthrie. Like any
14-year-old, he's driven by an insatiable appetite for the
world, marking the culture as it forms him. While Hillsbery
occasionally gives Radboy pop references that he probably
wouldn't know (Mrs. Olsen of Folger's Coffee, Ella and Memorex),
he has expressed the exuberance and wonder of a boy on the
cusp of manhood with great authenticity.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 26,
2000
|
