Asphalt is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 of speculative fiction written by Carl Hancock Rux

Carl Hancock Rux

‎Carl Hancock Rux is an award winning writer and performer; former Head of the MFA Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts and has taught or been in residence at University of California–San Diego, Stanford University, University of Massachusetts Amherst,...

 published by Atria/Simon & Schuster.

Plot

Racine, an expatriate DJ returns from an ill-fated stay in Paris to a war-torn New York City and finds himself lodging in a deteriorating civil war era brownstone in a Brooklyn neighborhood devastated by poverty and despair. Here he meets Manny, a cross dressing free spirit with a penchant for women and architectural history; Mawepi the stout bouncer and translator for the clairvoyant yet reclusive Holy Mother Lucinda and Couchette, an emotionally scarred lap dancer mired in denial regarding her famous jazz musician father's suicide (former owner of the house) and mother's unexpected death. Immediately Racine finds himself creating the sonic backdrop for intense parties, orgies and conversations while Manny and the other residents chase their dreams in a transitional New York. Couchette is the troubled spirit with whom Racine shares physically intimate and emotionally frustrating moments. The story weaves depictions of Racine's childhood, including his mother's death by fire when he was an infant; his experiences living with his brother, Frederick, in the custody of an uncle who is a disturbed religious zealot; Frederick's mysterious accidental death; Racine's eventual abandonment and years in foster care under the guardianship of a caring alcoholic; and the truth of his recent trip to France to visit a former schoolmate, Benoit, and his girlfriend. Rux infuses his tale with Greek mythology, mirroring Racine's tragic life experiences with that of Euripedes  Hippolytus who is physically dismembered by a monstrous force on his journey to redemption. The characters in Asphalt all employ different strategies for abandoning experiences that have consumed and distorted their views of reality and their conflict with memory and poses a rhetorical embedded question in abandoned buildings and the psychological after effects of war-torn cities as to how cultures and individuals handle suffering, loss and unresolved tragedy. The novel was written largely before 9/11.

Reviews

LA TIMES “Asphalt [is] a hallucinatory journey…set in a sooty, just-a-day-after-tomorrow future. The book blends speculative fiction and myth with real-life post-9/11 unease embroidered throughout…enamored with densely arranged assemblages—quirky juxtapositions, blurry borders—spinning dross into gold…a grand-scale collage".

L.A.WEEKLY "Asphalt,written largely before 9/11, is thick with images of and meditations on terror and terrorism, personal and cultural devastation, a post-apocalyptic New York, U.S. citizens living under a near police state, while citizenry of all races tote guns, real and metaphorical, whose bullets are anger and sadness. Music itself — rap, trance, jazz, rock & roll, R&B, techno, industrial — is a major character in the novel, underscoring emotion and politics, allowing Rux to excavate the damaged inner lives of his characters while ruminating on how the world around them feeds their despair and dares them to rise above self and surroundings."