Rage Is Back (Mansbach)

Rage is Back
Adam Mansbach, 2013
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670026128


Summary
Welcome to the Great American Graffiti Novel

Number one New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach returns with a blockbuster tale of revenge, redemption, and the world’s most beautiful crime. Dondi Vance is the son of two famous graffiti artists from New York City’s “golden era” of subway bombing. Recently kicked out of his prestigious prep school for selling weed—and his mother’s Brooklyn apartment for losing his scholarship— he’s couch-surfing his way through life, compulsively immune to rumors that his long-lost father, Billy Rage, has returned after sixteen years on the lam.

But Dondi’s old man really is back—what’s left of him, that is. A wizened shell of his former self, Billy is still reeling from a psychic attack by an angry sha-man in the Amazon basin when Dondi finds him at the top of a pseudo-magical staircase in DUMBO. The uneasy reunion comes just in time: Anastacio Bracken, the transit cop who ruined Billy’s life and shattered his crew back in 1987, is running for mayor. Only by rallying the forgotten writers of the eighties for an epic, game-changing mission can Billy and Dondi bring Bracken down.

In this mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes, villains, and eccentrics, Adam Mansbach balances an intricately plot­ted, high-stakes caper with a wildly inventive tale of time travel and shamanism, prodigal fathers and sons, and the hilariously intertwined realms of art, crime, and spirituality. Moving throughout New York City’s unseen com­munities, from the tunnel camps of the Mole People to the drug dens of Crown Heights, Rage Is Back is a kaleidoscopic tour de force from a writer at the top of his game. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Adam Mansbach is an American author, and has previously been a visiting writer and professor of literature at Rutgers University-Camden, with their New Voices Visiting Writers program (2009-2011). Mansbach wrote the "children's book for adults" Go the Fuck to Sleep. Other books Mansbach has written include Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews (for which he won the California Book Award for fiction in 2008). He lives in Berkeley, California and co-hosted a radio show, "Father Figures."(From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Rage Is Back is uneven, flashing bits of brilliance like a beautifully burned train clacking over a few minutes of elevated rail only to vanish into a labyrinth of digressions and affectations.... Whatever promise this plot may have held is undermined by a sort of literary attention deficit disorder. Mansbach’s characters tend to be as thin as rolling papers, and people and plot points alike are dropped and forgotten for little reason. Even Bracken, the chief villain, barely appears in the book.... Mansbach can write with real talent, maybe crazy talent. He ought to trust himself and put it up there for all of us to see.
Kevin Baker - New York Times Book Review


The novel...has a wild-style collage form that also ties in plot points involving a hallucinogenic vision-quest, the so-called "mole people" said to live in the city's tunnels, and time travel, because why not? Such a surfeit seems inspired by Jonathan Lethem's Brooklyn-centric magic realism, but it needlessly clutters up the story. At the center of Mr. Mansbach's paean to graffiti art should be Dondi's reconciliation with his father, but their relationship gets painted over with all the embellishments.
Wall Street Journal


Mansbach has clearly had a play date with Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz, and his fresh, witty novel is one that hip readers will relish once the kids have finally, mercifully, nodded off. Laced with zaniness and cultural bling, it's a nostalgic tribute to the glory days of street art, back when New York City had character, when those bubbly letters shouted from rambling subway cars and people loved to spot their favorite artists…What's more, it's invigorating to find a white writer willing to crash the color barrier…In the sweet and obscene voice of mixed-race Dondi, Mansbach has created a sharp commentator on the persistent nervousness of our integrated society.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Mansbach’s wild ride will likely earn cult-classic status—and deservedly so.... In Dondi, Mansbach has created an unforgettable narrator who combines elements of Holden Caulfield, Oscar Wao, and even a hint of Ignatius J. Reilly.
Eric Liebetrau - Boston Globe


A hilarious revenge thriller...[that reads] something like watching a Quentin Tarantino film or listening to a Wu-Tang Clan album—perhaps simultaneously. This is a great thing.... Rage Is Back has humor and horror and humanity and is altogether fresh.
Kevin Coval - Chicago Tribune


A rollicking, frenetic and hilarious jaunt through the (literal and figurative) New York City underworld...[that] does for graffiti what Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay did for comic books.... [Rage is Back] mashes up disparate linguistic registers with an effortlessness that brings to mind Junot Diaz’s perennial narrator, Junior.... Beneath all the weed and spray paint, it’s a warmhearted story about a son searching for his father and for himself, a trip through the past and present of an American art form.
David Lukas - San Francisco Chronicle
 

A muscular ode to New York City’s 1980s art underground.... Combines a poet's touch with the wild sparks of a subway train speeding through a graffiti-splashed tunnel.
Elle


In this slick, outlandish novel by bestselling author Mansbach (Go the F**k to Sleep), 18-year-old biracial Kilroy Dondi Vance, a “lightskinned cat,” is expelled from a New York City private academy for peddling hydroponic marijuana. Sixteen years earlier, in 1989, Dondi’s white father, Billy Rage, a popular graffiti artist, had a violent encounter with NYPD’s Vandal Squad, led by Anastacio Bracken....[and] fled to Mexico. Now, in 2005, Dondi finds Billy back in town... [and] resolves to bring [Bracken] down via a new graffiti campaign. Though Dondi’s voice, a combination of sophistication and raw urban slang, feels at time forced, Mansbach’s novel is a fun and exciting read.
Publishers Weekly


Mansbach was minding his own business as a respected novelist, poet, and essayist when he pulled an extraordinary coup by writing the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Go the F**k To Sleep. Biracial Brooklynite Kilroy Dondi Vance, pot dealer and prep school scholarship student, is the son of renowned graffiti writer Billy Rage—back in town to challenge his old nemesis, Metropolitan Transit Authority chief Anastacio Bracken, who's running for mayor.
Library Journal


Mansbach (Seriously, Just Go To Sleep, 2012, etc.) returns to fictionalizing the untidy corners of the New York City culture wars. Our admittedly unreliable narrator is Dondi Vance, a biracial scholarship student and part-time hydro dealer.... [H]is papa, Billy Rage, the city's most infamous graffiti artist, vanished in 1989 after his best friend's murder. Now everyone on the scene is clashing with Billy's nemesis, corrupt transit authority bureaucrat Anastacio Bracken. As a narrator, Dondi wields a fantastic but implausible voice that is electric with rhythm, riddled with bullshit and wise beyond its years.... Dondi's story proves thrilling: The book is peppered with grandfatherly revolutionaries, slang-slinging young bloods and an army of paint-wielding ninjas who unite with military precision on an ambitious plan to graffiti-bomb every single train car on the MTA.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What was your opinion of graffiti before reading this book? Has your opinion changed in any way?

2. Some artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey use the medium of graffiti to create work that is considered “high art” and respected by critics and the public. Fairey’s portrait of Obama, for example, was used in the 2008 presidential campaign. If you’re unfamiliar with their work, take a moment to look it up. What do you think of it? Why is their graffiti treated differently from the type of work described by Mansbach?

3. Dondi strains against the rules of society in ways both large and small. Have you ever broken the law? Challenged authority? Rebelled against the expectations placed on you by parents?

4. Rage Is Back plays with the typical narrative form. The majority of chapter 8 is taken up by Theo Polhemus’s short story, and Cloud 9 narrates chapter 10. How did this affect your engagement with the story? Why did Mansbach do this?

5. Dondi says that “rupture is...hardwired into everything my parents’ generation of New Yorkers built” (page 229). What does he mean?

6. Many of the characters are more sympathetic than one might expect; some are darker than they first seem. Which characters did you respond to in ways that surprised you?

7. Dondi struggles to understand his father. Do you believe that Billy is a good man? Explain.

8. Although Bracken is the dark counterpart to Billy’s hero, he appears very few times in the novel. What were his motives in pursuing graffiti artists in general, and Billy in particular? Was there something otherworldly in the tunnels that influenced his behavior?

9. On page 274, Dondi admits that he wants to be recognized as the kind of person who is “pointed at, whispered about.” How does this play into his feelings toward his father, who is just such a person?

10. Karen is the only prominent female character, but she more than holds her own against all the male graffiti artists. What was your response to her? At one point, Dondi mentions that she had a psychotic break due to exhaustion from worrying about his health. Is the resulting psychological imbalance demonstrated in the course of the book?

11. What if Billy Rage had stayed in New York after the death of Amuse? Would Dondi and Karen have benefited from his presence in their lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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