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Summary
Summary
A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us. Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter appears, summoning him to the frozen woods of Vermont. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard The Voice: a mysterious murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, or a whisper in an empty room that may or may not be from God. Evoking the disorienting wonder of writers like Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, but driven by Victor LaValle's perfectly pitched comic sensibility BIG MACHINE is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt.
Author Notes
Victor D. LaValle is an assistant professor in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
LaValle has garnered critical acclaim for his previous works (a collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and novel, The Ecstatic), and his second novel is sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe. Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice takes a chance on an anonymous note delivered to him at the cruddy upstate New York bus depot where he works as a porter. Quickly, Ricky finds himself among the "Unlikely Scholars," a secret society of ex-addicts and petty criminals, all black like him, living in remote Vermont and sifting through stacks of articles in a library devoted to investigating the supernatural; the existence of a god; and the legacy of Judah Washburn, an escaped slave who claimed to have had contact with a higher being that the Unlikely Scholars now call "the Voice." Ricky's intoxicating voice-robust, organic, wily-is perfect for narrating LaValle's high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, as the fateful porter-something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of "spiritual X-men"-wanders through America's "messianic hoo-hah." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
Listed among Victor LaValle's acknowledgments of those who've influenced him are Ishmael Reed and Stephen King. And "Big Machine" begins as a Reed novel, with African-Americans living on the margins - Ricky Rice, janitor and former drug abuser, and Adele Henry, alcoholic and former prostitute - recruited as "unlikely scholars" by a secret organization investigating the supernatural, first from a library in Vermont, later in the tunnels beneath a city that could be Oakland. Funded by a former slave named Washburn, who started a Christian cult, the organization dispatches the pair to combat a heretical splinter group intent on restoring Washburn's original revelation, which is none too clear. Here King kicks in as Ricky is impregnated by a Marsh Devil, a monstrous creature from Native American folklore. Violence, romance (for Ricky and Adele, not the Devil), a tale about possibly paranormal cats and a final desperate flight ensue. "Big Machine" wants to be a big novel about big ideas, particularly Christianity and race in America, past and present. If not big in size, the novel does seem long. LaValle lavishes considerable detail on Ricky's childhood survival of a mini-Jonestown, and Ricky narrates in an often rich vernacular, but way too many pages are devoted to getting people in and out of cars, in and out of clothes, and in and out of tight scrapes - hallmarks of novels that try to be big sellers.
Guardian Review
Three years off the junk and making ends meet cleaning the bathrooms at a railway station, Ricky receives an envelope containing a two-line note and a bus ticket to Burlington, Vermont. A middle-aged black man, minding nobody's business but his own, he is stunned both by the destination - "the whitest state there is" - and the revelatory nature of the accompanying text. Four days later, he finds himself in a log cabin in the woods with six other petty criminals, waiting to be inducted into the mysterious work of the Washburn Library, an institution founded by a runaway slave two centuries before. Ricky is about to become a paranormal investigator, a task to which he finds he is suited - being one of the few survivors of a 1970s suicide cult. Winner of multiple awards in the States, LaValle's genre-bending novel fuses noir, horror and satire to penetrate the Big Machines of the American psyche - faith, status, identity. Like his spiritual forebears Chester Himes and Nelson Algren, he speaks for the unsung so we can hear their voice. Listen. - Cathi Unsworth Three years off the junk and making ends meet cleaning the bathrooms at a railway station, Ricky receives an envelope containing a two-line note and a bus ticket to Burlington, Vermont. - Cathi Unsworth.
Kirkus Review
Lavalle (The Ecstatic, 2002, etc.) fractures all our tidy notions of how well-made fiction ought to behave in his singular tale of a bizarre quest that achieves apocalyptic fulfillment. "Recovering" heroin addict and freelance criminal Ricky Rice encounters new temptations and challenges when he's lured away from his nowhere janitorial job at the Utica, N.Y., bus station and transported to Vermont's Northern Kingdom, to become part of an all-black group of petty crooks and whores at the Washburn Library, a forested compound founded by a runaway slave. Not resonant enough for you yet? Consider the resemblance of this novel's plot to that of a classic American novel whose narrator-protagonist embarks on a perilous adventure, ignores a mad prophet's warning and falls into the orbit of a deranged messiah prepared to sacrifice himself and his acolytes in a vengeful battle against the universe. Specifically, Ricky is enlisted as one of several "Unlikely Scholars" charged with researching paranormal phenomena and making connections between cosmic and historical injustices. His personal assignment: to travel to San Francisco, where Jim Joneslike extremist Solomon Clay is fomenting revolutionand ice the sucker. Further complications lurk in Ricky's egregious past, for his worst sins have gone largely unpunished, despite the cleansing mayhem performed by a confrontational ur-feminist cult, the Washerwomen. Redemption may lurk in the eponymous Big Machine, explicitly defined as "Doubt [which] grinds up the delusions of women and men." But there's another Big Machine hovering in a physician's office that partially explains the burden of guilt hanging like an albatross around Ricky's neck. Further developments include the miracle of Ricky's pregnancy (honestly); the suggestion that the Devil lives in California; and a hellacious climax set in San Francisco Bay that explicitly echoes the Shakespearean finale of Moby Dick. Too idea-hungry and haywire to be fully successful, too alive and abrasive to be missed. The multicultural novel has come of agesmashingly. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Don't look for dignity in public bathrooms. The most you'll find is privacy and sticky floors. But when my boss gave me the glossy envelope, the bathroom was the first place I ran. What can I say? Lurking in toilets was my job. I was a janitor at Union Station in Utica, New York. Specifically contracted through Trailways to keep their little ticket booth and nearby bathroom clean. I'd done the same job in other upstate towns, places so small their whole bus stations could've fit inside Union Station's marbled hall. A year in Kingston, six months in Elmira. Then Troy. Quit one and find the next. Sometimes I told them I was leaving, other times I just disappeared. When I got the envelope, I went to the bathroom and shut the door. I couldn't lock it from the inside so I did the next best thing and pulled my cleaning cart in front of the door to block the way. My boss was a woman, but if the floors in front of the Trailways booth weren't shining she'd launch into the men's room with a fury. She had hopes for a promotion. But even with the cart in the way I felt exposed. I went into the third stall, the last stall, so I could have my peace. Soon as I opened the door, though, I shut it again. Good God. Me and my eyes agreed that the second stall would be better. I don't know what to say about the hygiene of the male species. I can understand how a person misses the hole when he's standing, but how does he miss the hole while sitting down? My goodness, my goodness. So, it was decided, I entered stall number two. The front of the envelope had my name, written by hand, and nothing else. No return address in the corner or on the back, and no mailing address. My boss just said the creamy yellow envelope had been sitting on her desk when she came in that morning. Propped against the green clay pen holder her son made in art class. I held the envelope up to the fluorescent ceiling lights and saw two different papers inside. One a long rectangle and the other a small square. I tapped the envelope against my palm, then tore the top half slowly. I blew into the open envelope, turned it upside down, and dropped both pieces of paper into my hand. "Ricky Rice!" I heard my name and a slap against the bathroom door. Hit hard enough that the push broom fell right off my cleaning cart and clacked against the tile floor. You would've thought a grenade had gone off from the way I jumped. The little sheets of paper slipped from my palm and floated to that sticky toilet floor. "Aw, Cheryl!" I shouted. "Don't give me that," she yelled back. I walked out the stall to my cleaning cart. Lifted the broom and pulled the cart aside. Didn't even have time to open the door for Cheryl, she just pushed at it any damn way. I flicked the ceiling lights off, like a kid who thinks the darkness will hide him. I'm going to tell you something nice about my boss, Cheryl McGee. She could be sweet as baby's feet as long as she didn't think you were taking advantage. When I first moved to Utica, she and her son even took me out for Chicken Riggies. It was a date, but I pretended I didn't know. The stink of failure had followed my relationships for years, and I preferred keeping this job to trying for love again. Now she stood at the bathroom door, trying to peek around me. A slim little redhead who'd grown her hair down to her waist and wore open-toed sandals in all but the worst of winter. "Someone's in there?" she asked, looked up at the darkened lights. "Me," I said. She pointed her chin down, but her eyes up at me. She thought she looked like a mastermind, dominating with her glare, but I'd been shot at before. Once, I was thrown down a flight of stairs. Excerpted from Big Machine: A Novel by Victor D. LaValle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
