Graffiti Palace is a claustrophobic novel that feels longer and denser than the page count.
Monk is a black (mixed race) Los Angelean caught up in the 1965 Watts Riots as he tries to come home to his partner Karmann, heavily pregnant in her shipping container home by the docks. Monk is a kind if urban curator, copying down gangland graffiti in his blue notebook, interpreting it and thereby understanding the ley-lines that run through the suburbs. Normally he is allowed free passage by the gangs and the cops, his knowledge is priceless intel for everyone concerned.
But in the riots, the rules have changed. Nobody trusts anybody. Every encounter might end badly, progress through the suburbs is painstakingly made, block by block, doubling back, lying low.
This creates a road trip novel - albeit a very short road trip across the chaotic, anarchic city. Each chapter provides a fresh encounter for Monk. He meets the Fruit of Islam, murderous Chinese laundry owners, psychics, police, graffiti artists, drug dealers, an elderly Japanese yakuza woman, Godzilla, more gangsters and a mortuary technician. There are occasional references forwards and backwards, but there's a real feeling of dungeons and dragons - a series of barely connected discrete incidents. It is jerky and there is little feeling of real progress - or indeed, the passage of time.
The strength of the novel is capturing the diversity of life in the ghetto. It is set at a particular point of time and space, and the range of people going about their lives amidst the riots, as the city burns. It is a narrative device, sure, but the descriptions drip with authenticity. They create depth and meaning into signs and symbols that most of us will never even have noticed. They also create a misleading sense that life in the ghetto is varied and exciting; the reality is that without Monk, these worlds would never meet. The monotony of people's lives is occasionally hinted at but doesn't quite come through. It's all just a bit too exciting.
When the end comes, it feels like a relief. A somewhat sudden relief. Spending time with Monk, never able to see beyond the next junction, is terribly claustrophobic.
Overall, this adds up to something that is quite hypnotic and surprisingly captivating. It shouldn't work but it does.
