Customer Reviews

The Sabotage Cafe

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The Sabotage Cafe is a great, great book. This tale of a punkrock runaway in Minneapolis grabs your attention from the first page and never lets it go.

If you've ever been that teen (or if you are) who thought music held the answer to everything and your parents didn't know the answer to anything, you should read this book. Really.

The novel presents a fascinating view of today's punk counterculture. At the same time, it's really about the relationship between a rebellious teenager and her mentally unbalanced mother. In fact, the novel is told completely from the mother's perspective, which may or may not be reliable. (I'd say the odds are on NOT.)

The mother imagines the daughter's journey away from suburbia and into a punk demi-monde -- and Furst offers a critical and sometimes comical view of both worlds. The rupture in the bond between mother and daughter is ultimately heartbreaking. I found Furst's prose fluid and engaging, but emotionally he pulls no punches -- a soft glove, but clenched in a fist. Powerful stuff.

Sabotage Cafe is, simply, excellent. I just finished it this morning, and, though I rarely feel moved to review books, it was that good: a powerful account of a mother-daughter relationship, told by the mother. One might have thought Furst had bitten off more than he could chew - by making his narrator not only female but also diagnosed with a personality disorder - but it's all pulled off quite miraculously. I don't want to give anything away, but: great milieu, great characters, and bonus points also for a beautiful cover - peel off the dustwrapper and you'll see what I mean.

Set in Minneapolis, this dark and menacing novel is all about the anguish of a mother and daughter and the self-destructive paths they take as they navigate through their perilous existences. Sabotage Café begins just as Julia's rebellious teenage daughter Cheryl locks herself in her bedroom, packs her bags and then marches out the front door, deciding that she's had enough of her mother, all the while quietly cursing the woman's existence.

We aren't quite sure of the events that have led up to Cheryl's sudden outburst of militaristic fervor, only that there's something about Julia's actions over the past few months that has caused her daughter to unexpectedly unravel. While Cheryl, complete with her backpack covered in graffiti and safety-pin starbursts, heads to downtown Minneapolis, to get lost, all Julia can do is watch her daughter recede, pulling away and willing herself toward a place where her mother will no longer be able to find or infect her.

But it isn't that easy for Cheryl to merely cast her mother off at the drop of a hat. Both, after all, are tarred with the same psychological brush, with Cheryl's teenage defiance almost like a mirror image of Julia's own inclination for rebelliousness back in the early 1980's when she got into the local punk and new wave scene at the Minneapolis' counter cultural landscape Sabotage Café, the place where misfits of all sorts met and mingled. Now a respectable married suburban woman, there's little about Cheryl's obsessions and disarming ways that Julia hasn't already experienced.

At first glance, Cheryl is simultaneously smart and scarred, somehow at once armor-plated and utterly vulnerable. When she finally disappears into the deep, dark shadows below the I-169 highway, Julia continues to watches over her, knowing deep inside that she can't really escape her mother's clutches even if she wanted to. "I live inside of her, just as she lives inside of me, " she says to herself as her husband Robert arrives home from work and blames his wife for his daughter's impulsive disappearance.

Homeless and jobless and hungry, Cheryl eventually forms an uneasy bond with Jarod, a lonely and morose teenager, who along his pet dog accompanies Cheryl as she lives on the streets, scavenging for food and finding shelter where she can. Ultimately her friendship with Jarod leads her to fall in with a rat-tag group of post-punk anarchists who want to change the world as they lie, cheat, steal their way through life, and who squat in the deserted and dumble-down shell of the Sabotage Café, now boarded shut.

Cheryl has this misguided idea that somewhere out there she is going to find a new vision of the world, "like a kind of Burning Man illumination." She could already tell she wouldn't find it with Jarod, but tt is here in the gloomly atmospheric Sabotage Café that Cheryl falls under the seductive spell of the cruel and machievallian Trent with whom she has a passionate and fiery affair and who represents tough the alternative to suburban convention of her mother.

Cheryl's passion for Trent soon morphs into a full-blown love, something vast and overwhelming, and filled with dangerous and hidden consequences. Meanwhile, author Joshua Furst oscillates between Julia's fanatical obsession with finding Cheryl, and her constant angst-ridden emotionally confused confessions of her undying love for her daughter and her memories of her sister Sarah, six years gone, and the only person whom Julia could confide in. In the end, all Julia can do was wait, locked in Cheryl's bedroom and root around in her closet, burying herself in her daughter's clothes, straining for further glimpses of her and the relationship they might have had.

It comes as no surprise that hanging around with Trent opens up a Pandora's box of bad behaviour and it doesn't take long for Cheryl's to survive on eating fast food from dumpsters, while she gets her kicks out of sniffing glue and popping prescription drugs; it's all sort of cool and there's nothing she wouldn't do, "there was no order, no rules, "except those Trent, or his friend Mike or rarely Cheryl made up, as they all strive for beauty or for a refined, stylized sort of ugliness."

This novel is full of hard-edged and brittle ironies, an emotionally hair-raising and quite terrifying study of two lives hell-bent and out of control. As Julia gradually descends into a kind of delusional paranoia, certain that her daughter will return and all will be forgiven, Cheryl becomes ever more determined to shut any memories of her mother, letting her love for Trent take over and his mad attempts to achieve some sort of distant glory in a revolution that would never come.

Passionate and fiery, Julia certainly hopes that Cheryl will be much tougher than her. But both seem to be emotionally immature, even as they are capable of capable of great empathy, and both are obviously smart but are also total narcissists. This novel is ultimately about the victim and the survivor, a mother and daughter who do love each other with a distracting and disarming intensity. But it's a love that it whispers and lulls them both into a false calm, leaving them unprepared for the next blow when it inevitably comes. Mike Leonard December 07.