The Ecstatic.

by Victor La Valle Crown, November 2002 $22.95, ISBN 0-609-61014-7

Terse, tight-lipped and fevered Victor LaValle's The Ecstatic is an auspicious first novel that ranges with obsessive-compulsive precision over the same pulpy patch of black-geek meta-culture that Colson Whitehead so slyly (and effectively) attacked with The Intuitionist. In much the same way that Whitehead's quirky debut announced him as an aggressively literary writer hoping to tackle "big" themes, Lavalle establishes a beachhead on what seems like the grotesque 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 demons that manage to be personal, social, figurative and literal all at the same time.

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

The Ecstatic opens with Anthony being "rescued" from a wreck of an apartment (and by, extension, morbid obesity) by his family, who worry that his state of slacker disarray is actually the early onset of the same psychosis that had his mother in and out of institutions through-out her life. (LaValle has written a few articles detailing his own battle with obesity, giving The Ecstatic graphic depictions of weight-loss hysteria added edge.) Anthony moves in with his family, but instead of making a retreat, his ignoble return to the primal scene is a new beginning chock-full of potential "cures" for him: "preachers and shrinks, art and love," as well as vertiginous subplots and side-bits that will either open the door to his salvation or finally destroy him. Among them are his 13-year old 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 second book--his collection of short stories, Slapboxing With Jesus, was published in 2000--The Ecstatic has a few first-novel glitches, mainly occasional lapses in tone and concentration, but overall it's a daring performance.

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

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