Nolan Knight
The Neon Lights are Veins
Publisher: 280 Steps
Review by James Pate
I’ve
always been drawn to stories about misfits and rebels, individuals
existing on the outer fringe who radically take their lives into
their own hands, for good or ill. Struggling artists, street-level
visionaries, punks, insomniacs, wanderers, the obsessed and the
damned.
Nolan
Knight’s The Neon Lights Are Veins (280 Steps) is a
Californian crime novel teeming with misfits. There’s the
protagonist, Alvi Drake, whose legendary days as a skateboarder are
behind him, and who is tormented by a painful family history
involving a conniving, crazed mother and a recently deceased wife.
There’s Mongo, a transvestite dreaming of fame and adoration in a
city where she knows the odds are against her. And there’s Faye, a
recent arrival to Los Angeles who is struggling against the myriad
social forces pushing her toward a life of prostitution. There are
others too, in this social orbit – most of the them living in a
crumbling apartment building called the Hotel Lafayette -- and taken
together, they made me think of Andy Warhol’s Superstars of the
late 60s and early 70s, whose drug and sex fueled lives created a
micro counterculture. Knight clearly has sympathy for these
characters. Neon is one of those noir novels where the
so-called deviants are actually the good guys. Even the fetishists
are treated with good humor, presented not as sickos but as people
with unusual sexual appetites. Knight has a Rabelaisian interest in
the diversity of human nature.
The
bad guys are the ones after money and power and control. Ray Satin is
the ringleader of a group of very violent men who make small fortunes
through drugs and pimping. Satin is vicious – his weapon of choice
is the screwdriver, which he uses on both men and women, strangers
and relatives – and he views other people as rungs on the ladder
toward greater wealth. He is a dangerous combination of psychopath
and narcissist. As he tells his men early in the book, “Money,
power and monopoly—that’s the goal, gentleman—in that order.”
When we meet him, he has started to make inroads with the police and
City Hall, a move he hopes will pay off with a near total control of
the Los Angeles underworld.
There
are two factors at work against his grand designs, however: his
nephew Rocco, and Alvi Drake. The nephew is sickened by the cruelty
of his uncle’s world, even though he participates in that world by
helping his uncle literally bury the bodies. He dreams of a more
everyday life. While on the campus of UCLA, he imagines himself as
just another student. Knight writes, “He reclined the seat and shut
his eyes, envisioning dorm room summer nights, intellectualism
sandwiched by beer pong and togas. All those great things the movies
had promised.” Rocco is trapped in a Tarantino movie but wants to
be in a Linklater one. As the story progresses, Rocco’s desire for
escape starts to run counter his uncle’s desire for underworld
dominance. Alvi Drake, in contrast, is an outsider to Satin’s
world. He is looking for a missing ex-girlfriend named Gabby. His
quest takes him into a grim, treacherous network where no one but his
most immediate friends can be trusted.
Part
three of the novel is titled “The Underground Web,” and, like the
best of Californian noir, the novel reveals the shadows and back room
deals that dwell beneath the sunshine, beaches, and mellow vibes.
Knight’s Los Angeles is a double-sided coin: a haven for rebels
like Alvi and Mongo, but also a Gothic terrain of nihilistic power
grabs.
The
last third of the novel is a fragmented, explosive showdown between
these two spheres. It’s not giving too much away to say that things
do not always go well for the more sympathetic characters. Knight’s
novel is strikingly bleak in places, and the more familiar plotline
of the good guys handily winning certainly does not apply here. But
this pessimism is one of the best elements of the novel, giving it an
unexpectedly tragic dimension.
For
all of the book’s fatalism, though, Neon is not a depressing
work. The narrative has an amphetamine-like intensity. And Knight’s
language sings with a streetwise poeticism reminiscent of Hurbert
Selby Jr., Lou Reed, and Richard Price. When Alvi walks into a
barbershop, he heads “past the candy cane spiral, into the lair of
man. Ricky Nelson crooned. Smut rags and nickel pulps cluttered the
magazine rack; Lawrence Tierney and Killer Kowalski sneered from mint
green walls.” Rocco strolls the through the grounds of UCLA and
thinks it is “the Monica Vitti of college campuses: lean, tan,
Romanesque—hypnotic to the human eyes.” In The Neon Lights Are
Veins, the language is constantly surprising, bouncing around on
the balls of its feet.
The
publishing history of Knight’s book is an odd one, to say the
least. 280 Steps, a Norwegian crime press founded in 2013, published
Neon this past winter. A few months later, 280 Steps suddenly
ceased to exist. The last time I checked, there were only seven
copies of Knight’s novel left to buy online. I hope the book gets
re-issued shortly by another press. It’s a fierce, bold work, and
deserves a wide readership.
