Customer Reviews

A Crack Up at the Race Riots

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As has already been pointed out, there's nothing coherent about this book except its own incoherence, its anti-form form. As with most decadent and absurdist literature, the whole is subordinate to the parts, and these parts include nonsensical fragments of conversations, random ideas, bad jokes, suicide notes, and a picture of MC Hammer at age 12. Taken together, they illuminate the bizzare and dark sensibilities of a truly talented and passionate young artist with a sensitive finger on the pulse of this American nation. But don't take them together. Or at least, don't try to fit them together into some meaningful message. There isn't one. Or perhaps rather, in the most absract sense, the message is there is no message. So if you're looking for and are used to a well crafted story and plot that all hangs together nicely, then don't shell out the 15 bones for this (note)book. But, since you're reading this review, you probably already have some familiarity with Harmony's other work (films and whatnot) and will probably like this too. On a slight side note, I noticed that some reviewers felt that Harmony's aesthetic intentions don't translate well into book form. I'm not sure I know completely what all his intentions are, but I think these reviewers make a good point. Korine seems to me to be primarily a visualist (as evidenced by that stupefying tapestry of beauty Gummo), and this book, I think, fails to capture the haunting and poetic imagery Korine is going for, and which he renders so well in the cinematic form. So maybe if I had one word to describe this book, it would be cinematic. But literature doesn't work so well when it tries to be cinematic, that's why it's literature. (And I would go as far as to say vice-versa.) But of course that's something to be discussed and debated, and not here. So in the end, I give it 4 stars, because I enjoy Korine and his imagination.

Someone called this a postmodernist novel. I don't think so. It's not a novel. It's an old form, the laundry list appropriated for literary purposes. Narrative glue that normally binds the ideas in a novel is entirely missing. It's like Korine went about recording little snippets of thought and conversations on scraps of paper, then pulled them all together and arranged them by topic like suicide notes, overheard conversations, movie ideas etc. It's like a found object collage. Chapter titles are the only hint at what Korine is thinking.

But ultimately, we're on our own when it comes to tying all the scraps together. It's kind of looking at small tiles on a bathroom floor. Sooner or later you'll start seeing patterns.

But Korine's selection of scraps is not random. Korine collects among the lower classes. He gives the podium to people who don't normally have a voice in our culture, people who may or may not have jobs, people with no concern for political correctness.

And I think that this is where Korine deserves 5 stars. He makes us look at people we don't normally want to look at. He doesn't glamorize them, he doesn't apologize for them. He simply holds up the mirror and makes us look at them. He reminds us that not everyone gets to realize the American dream.

As for postmodernism or new literary forms, I think Korine got something going. Ideas in most modern literature are way too sparse. You have to wade through way too much narrative and plot to get at the few good ideas, insights, images. Korine simply throws out the ideas, images, lets you wander about and create your own picture.

Bless the lad, buy his book.

crack up at the race riots is part scrapbook, part videologue all in one. pieces of scripts, part conversations, fake rumors and ideas all writen by harmony korine (writer of Kids and writer director of Gummo and Julian Donkey Boy). Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or wonder if you're the butt of a joke (who pays for half writen lines anyway? me.) but it all ends up nicely. as a peek into the head of a genius.

Great book with the repetitive urgency of an obsessive compulsive disordered patient tied to a bed just out of arms reach of the light switch. Am I the only one who has noticed that this book is just a remake of Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up"?
Jessica Tandy really should have been married to John Stamos, and the next review I write will contain the following:
1)My name 2) My feelings for the author 3) my daily exercise regime which includes sit-ups.
This book is def worth the read and as a prerequisite, I suggest picking up Korine's inspiration for this novel: see above.

Harmony Korine, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots (Doubleday, 1998)

I'm a big, big fan of Harmony Korine as a director. As a writer, however, I was far less impressed than most with his screenplay for Kids, and now I've gotten to read his first novel, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots. My first thought upon finishing it was, "if anyone but Harmony Korine had written this, Doubleday would have laughed at it before tossing it into the fireplace."

This is a novel in only the loosest sense; plot, characterization, theme, and all the other things that comprise a novel are absent. It might have been marketed as a collection of flash fiction or poetry, but most of the time it's not even coherent enough for that. Most accurately, it's a collection of fragments. Some of those fragments are interesting, but there's not enough of that type to keep the reader's interest all the way through. About the best thing I can say is that Korine seems to have embraced the concept that if you're going to fail, you might as well fail spectacularly. **

I SAY BUY IT..I READ ALOT AND THIS IS OFF THE WALL... IF YOUR HERE LOOKING FOR "HARMONY" YOU'VE FOUND IT...THIS KID REVOLUTIONIZED WHAT MANY HOPE THEY CAN PRODUDE

I thought this was a very good book. Korine has such a wild imagination that contains so much realism that you actually say to yourself "Is this for real?" I totally loved it.

To anyone planning to buy this book based on the strength of Korine's film work: buyer beware. This debut "novel" is no such thing, as it has no characters, setting, or linear narrative. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but Korine replaces them with a series of random lists, scrawlings, and formulaically obscene snippets. One could praise this failure if it failed because it was over reaching itself, but throughout one gets the impression that Korine was never really shooting for anything at all. The book attempts to look thrown together, but unfortunately the writing appears to be so also. My copy now resides in the bathroom, both because it's short attention span driven text is suited well to this enviornment, and it helps to get people out of there quickly. Thoroughly disapointing.

First off, A Crackup at the Race Riots is not so much a novel as a conceptual joke about novels. OK, fair enough, I mean, this is Harmony Korine we're talking about. He made Gummo, we know he's a brilliant film-maker. Trouble is, as somebody says below, many of the jokes are stolen. There are some particularly egregious steals from Donald Barthelme, who went typographically mad with considerably more style. The main reason I'm willing to thrust my avant-garde sensibilities aside and refuse to give him the benefit of the doubt is that, on closing the book, my dominant emotion was acute envy that I hadn't thought of trying to pull off something as easy as this myself.

A Crackup has some nice ideas and pretty good jokes, but something is reminding me ominously of what happened in punk rock; just because the Sex Pistols were a good band, doesn't mean that anyone can do it. I wonder if Korine isn't becoming the Cockney Rejects to his own Pistols, as it were; deliberately trying to glorify being shambolic. That attitude was invented and promoted (in punk rock, anyway) not by bands but by entrepreneurs seeking to make a buck and by left-wing journalists projecting their half-assed ideas onto innocent musicians, and if Korine is trying to emulate in his own work, he risks disappearing up a conceptual fundament. Don't go there, Harmony! Remember Alan Clarke!

Kathy Acker did this stuff so much better, anyway.

umm, I think it is a bit short-sighted to label a book as confusing. For example, the Wasteland is confusing and 80 some years after its conception it is hailed as a work of genius. Ulysses is practically written in a foriegn language and I've heard college professors call it the greatest novel of the twentieth century. But more importanly it is short-sighted to call this book "confusing" because there is a difference between confusing the reader and making the reader think and use his or her own head in a new and different way. Of course, the ability to do this is solely up to the reader and so obviously not everyone is going to like this book. In short, if you think this or any book, is confusing then try harder. Me? I think it's lovely.