Rage Is Back (Mansbach)

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