Customer Reviews

Understand This (California Fiction)

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UNDERSTAND THIS is a classic book for the 90's, a thoroughly modern re-telling of ROMEO AND JULIET. But this time, instead of the Montagues and the Capulets, we've got rival gangs in south central, unwed moms, and some damn good dialogue. Tervalon has a strong voice and his characters shine with the kind of authentic alive-ness that many writers strive for, but few realize. UNDERSTAND THIS sets a tone for inner-city romance. It's not enough to chronicle, one must create art. Tervalon does this, and does it well. We don't feel sorry for anyone in this novel, we don't patronize, and we don't pity. What we do by the end of the novel,as we turn the last page, is what Tervalon hoped, and he succeeds brilliantly. We understand - this. Just a little bit better.

Tervalon can write. There's not a sentence that doesn't fit. Every word is in exactly the right place and contributes to the whole, and yet the writing is so restrained and understated that you have no sense of the author's presence, but only of his many, extraordinarily vivid characters. The plot is the least interesting part of the book, but still it hooks you. The book, like life, has its melodramatic moments, but also moments of humor and lots of sympathetic insight into a host of interesting people trying, with varying degrees of success, to make the best of their lives. The abiding feeling left by the book is not the cliched angst of urban hopelessless, etc. etc., but something far more positive and difficult to describe, because the world of this book is far too complex and finely-drawn to be summarized in any string of adjectives. A terrific book.

Tervalon grew up in South Central LA and taught high school in Watts, so it should come as no surprise that his 1994 debut novel set in the same milieu is a gripping polyphonic work that rings with authenticity. Eight different narrators alternate over fifteen chapters to bring to life the problems of growing up in the 'hood in story bookended by shootings. The book starts with teenage football player Francois tossing a football in the street with his old friend turned dealer Doug, who is promptly gunned down by his girlfriend Rika. The first three chapters follow Francois and his tough-as-nails, straight-talking girlfriend Margot, as he struggles to deal with the murder and avoid Doug's brother Ollie, who's intent on revenge.

Chapter four shifts to Francois and Margot's English teacher Michaels, a figure who appears to be modeled on Tervalon and provides the first adult view on these struggling kids. Next chapter is Ollie, whose efforts to step into his big brother's shoes as player/dealer are quickly squashed. Francois's mother Ann steps in to provide the perspective of a long-despairing mother trying to keep her kids on the right path, but without a too much conviction. Crackhead Rika appears next, and is shown to have quickly shed her privileged background to become be a hardened femme fatale figure. Unfortunately, her backstory feels rather incomplete, and as she's a pivotal figure in the narrative, it's a pity Tervalon didn't devote a little more time to her story.

The story then shifts back to Francois and Margot, whose stormy relationship appears to be destined to wreck upon the imminent shores of Margot's departure for college at UC-Santa Cruz. She details a one-week orientation trip up there that might as well be to a foreign country for its strangeness. Meanwhile, Francois dabbles in the drug trade up in Santa Barbara with his shady friend Tommy, who narrates the next chapter. Tommy isn't a particularly distinctive figure, and his voice feels somewhat similar to the braggadocio of Ollie. Francois returns to Los Angeles, where Ann picks up the story again, having decided to move to Atlanta. She struggles with Francois' inexplicable (to her) depression and refusal to go to school and graduate.

Ann calls in Michaels, who half-heartedly tries to convince Francois to finish school up in the subsequent chapter. in the latter part of this, Michales meets up with Margot and shares an awkward dinner with her. He has a weird, uneasy attraction to Margot the whole book which is never fully articulated and feels kind of forced. Francois returns to explain his new setup as the manager of a check-cashing store for another dealer and his final date with Margot, escorting her to Michaels' wedding. Things take a turn for the melodramatic when Ollie's sister Sally appears to reveal the discovery of Rika as a pregnant homeless woman. Sally is a fierce Christian who doesn't take any backtalk from Ollie and comes across as a younger, firmer version of Ann. She and Ann attempt to help Rika out, until a final climactic shooting. The coda is provided six months later by Michaels, who has left to go to law school, but returns to meet up with Margot after her first semester of college.

Overall this is a very impressive debut, although it might have been strengthened by sticking with fewer narrators. Michaels could have been fleshed out a bit more too--as the former insider, now an outside observer, he could have offered a more interesting perspective. Still, for the most part, the dialogue sparkles with reality as we see these kids struggling to operate within their highly constrained environment. A strong start for Tervalon, who has since moved into period fiction about New Orleans and is now embroiled in legal problems with his publisher.

This novel does what the writer Tom Wolfe says a novel should do: it goes deeply into a world that most of us don't know and brings back a lively and intelligent report that is well rendered and ultimately unforgettable. The story is tragic and hopeful and insightful and sad all at once. Good book.

This novel has incredible movement. I know that it's partially due to the South Central-dialectic language, but each sentence is so terse and action-packed -- frankly, I'm jealous. The first chapter felt somewhat forced, like the language didn't quite fit in spite of its informational density, but after 200-something pages, I feel convinced of its genuineness. It leaves me unsure of whether it had taken a while for the writing to settle into a consistent tone or whether it had just taken me a while to adapt to reading it with fluency. I do feel, however, (although maybe I'm biased after having been to the author's class) that narration from the perspective of the Mr. Michaels character feels less forced and more genuine. Again, though, maybe this is because reading his speech is more comfortable for me.

Each of the characters is written from such distinct perspectives, each of their desires, biases and even their IQs peeking out through their internal narratives. Margot is so distinctly female and even though she's hood, she's probably the smartest character in the novel; Ollie is insatiably power hungry and doesn't think before he hates. However, some of the characters have surprisingly similar inflection patterns and word choices. For example, I can't figure out if the repeated uses of "water off a duck's back" or "eightball" are meant to emphasize the way colloquialisms become popular in a particular community, if they are linguistic tropes used to tie disparate characters together in a cohesive narrative, or if they are evidence of the author's own default linguistic patterns. Not to say that "eightball" is a word that would come up often in conversation, but everyone has a certain linguistic repertoire that they subconsciously fall back on.

I felt both alienated by and drawn into the text simultaneously. I did not grow up in a neighborhood with violence. I don't understand that kind of lifestyle and probably never will. I also cannot relate to the hardness each of these characters has adopted. I am not condemning these fictional people for having to wear armor -- I have no idea what it would be like to have to face up to the possibility of death or of loved ones dying on a daily basis -- but it's not how I choose to deal with things. But I understand what it's like to feel trapped like Margot and like you need to get out, to start over. What it's like to feel inexorably drawn toward your future when it contains some looming grimness. I have driven to the beach late at night to try to sort things out and have run for miles trying to feel just a little better. I have tried to deal with people like Rika and François who are inconsolable, and who, in spite of your best efforts at getting them to understand you, just end up making the choices they would have made without you. Maybe that's the mark of a good story -- that it taps into some universal experience to which anyone can relate, regardless of how different the lives of the characters in this novel might be from mine, despite their living only blocks from where I live now.

It was strange to read this while living in Los Angeles, recognizing every street name and every neighborhood including those in Santa Barbara. I could mentally pick up the characters and plop them onto this map of what I know the city to look like, could feel their presence down the street from me in spite of their temporal and existential isolation from the real world. Some things about them felt stereotyped (the "money, cash, hoes" vs. Christ-saved mentalities, the push drugs or work at McDonald's false dilemma) but apparently none of the potential stereotypes were enough to stop the characters from feeling real. Most fiction is either largely non-fictional or a deliberate rejection of non-fiction, and this was distinctly the former.

This book was really good, I liked the humor that was in the book