By HARMONY KORINE (Main Street Books; 1998)
This innocuous looking 1998 trade paperback is a post-modern collage with nothing resembling a traditional narrative. A CRACKUP AT THE RACE RIOTS doesn’t actually involve race riots or a crack-up, and nor is it “A Novel Setting About the Bastard Wisher” (as the table of contents heading states), or “Swan Son of the Spick,” or “Like A Turk in Stockholm” (as two of the chapters are for some reason titled). What it is is a deeply strange literary mutation from a one-of-a-kind talent.
The book consists of meaningless snatches of conversation (“I’ll give you $1.00 if you hit her. I won’t hit her for $1.00. I’ll give you $2.50. Cinnamon sticks cost $2.75”), lists with no discernible rhyme or reason (“Books Found in Monty Clift’s Basement,” “Her Two Favorite Cigarette Jokes”), jokey anecdotes (“There was only one black girl in my high school and her last name was White”), random quotes (“More people commit suicide with a fork than with any other weapon”) and so forth. The subjects covered include suicide, obesity, homosexuality, amputation, the private lives of media figures and seemingly anything that happened to pop into the head of the then 23-year old Harmony Korine, a screenwriter (of 1995’s KIDS and 2002’s KEN PARK) and filmmaker (of 1997’s GUMMO and 1999’s JULIEN DONKEY-BOY) who with A CRACKUP AT THE RACE RIOTS provided a banger of a debut publication.
Also included is a page consisting entirely of the words “Robert Frost Biten,” another with a picture of M.C. hammer at age 11, and another with only the typed word “hepburn.” If that’s not enough for you, there are copious handwritten scrawls, drawings and a photo of the late teenage killer Richard Allan Kasso Jr. (1967-1984).
I’m not going to hazard a guess as to what any of this means, but I do recognize a peculiar genius at work in these pages. Korine’s depiction of an America packed with drug addicts, celebrity worship, suicides and physical deformity is a compelling one, and A CRACKUP AT THE RACE RIOTS a curiously beautiful, one of a kind grotesquerie. It’s certainly the only book you’ll find containing the words “Jessica Tandy had an elongated vagina.”