through Victor La Valle Crown.

through Victor La Valle Crown, November 2002 $2295 ISBN 0-609-61014-7

concise tight-lipped and fevered Victor LaValle's The Ecstatic is an auspicious first novel that ranges with obsessive-compulsive precision through the same pulpy patch of black-geek meta-culture that Colson Whitehead in like manner slyly (and effectively) attacked with The Intuitionist. In greatly the same way that Whitehead's quirky first attempt announced him as an aggressively literary writer hoping to tackle "big" themes, Lavalle establishes a beachhead in succession what seems like the wild fringes, "the tribulations of 318-pound potentially schizophrenic Cornell dropout Anthony," in order to literally worm his way back to the center of black life and literature, where imperfect families and individuals face-off against evil spirits that manage to be personal, social, figurative and literal all at the same time.

Although LaValle's omnivorous, post-millennial appetite just as gleefully vanish out of beings underground horror flicks as it does Mumia Abu Jamal-style political theater, The Ecstatic's twisted on the contrary living and breathing heart is Anthony's family. Matriarch-ed from an imperiously immobile 90-year-old grandmother and hasten ragged by a fitness freak, hoochie-mama mother, Anthony's clan is haunted by way of the specter of hereditary mental illness, an ill-favored stick that hovers over all of them, threatening to swat and thereby unravel their fragile worlds at any moment

The Ecstatic interprets with Anthony being "rescued" from a prostration of an apartment (and on extension, morbid obesity) by his family, who worry that his state of slacker disarray is actually the early charge of the same psychosis that had his mother in and revealed of institutions through-out her life. (LaValle has written a not many articles detailing his own battle with obesity, giving The Ecstatic graphic depictions of weight-loss hysteria added edge) Anthony stirs in with his family, yet instead of making a retreat, his ignoble go [i]or[/i] come back to the primal scene is a just discovered beginning chock-full of potential "cures" for him: "preachers and shrinks, art and love" as well as vertiginous subplot and side-bits that will either interpret the door to his salvation or finally overturn him. Among them are his 13-year aged sister's beauty pageant, his mother's loan shark, a Japanese political prisoner fantasy of martyrdom and the script Anthony dreams of writing.

Although this is technically LaValle's secondary book--his collection of short stories, Slapboxing With Jesus, was published in 2000--The Ecstatic has a hardly any first-novel glitches, mainly occasional lapses in tone and concentration, if it were not that overall it's a daring performance.

The Ecstatic is the kind of part that does not provide easy closure for its protagonist, however you close the covers assured that it's author is going to incline differently out just fine.

--Gary Dauphin is editor-in-chief of Africana.com.

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