Words Like Riffs

I sometimes feel as though college was an exercise in realizing how little I (and most of the people around me) know about the world. That being said, I got more out of school than an ego check and a dim view of people who claim to have conclusive solutions for major social problems. Among other things, I improved my ability to read 'difficult' novels. Note here that I really mean read, not wholly understand.

Since my current job doesn't offer much in the way of intellectual challenge, I've been gobbling up weird books steadily for the last year. Some of them, like Bolaño's 2666, proved extremely enjoyable, even if I wasn't quite sure I 'got' it. Others, like Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, were chores to get through.

But the weirdest book I've read in my year of weird books is definitely The Orange Eats Creeps, by Grace Krilanovich.

This short novel speaks from the perspective of a girl who's become a "teenage vampire hobo junkie" in the Pacific Northwest, but the vampire pretense is dropped within the first several dozen pages of the narrative. To the extent that it's about anything at all, it focuses on the debasement and exploitation that young women face in society's more decrepit and poorly-lit corners.

But even that theme is kind of fuzzy. I read a review of the book somewhere in which the writer speculated that The Orange Eats Creeps aims to portray the interior mental state of a vagrant drug addict rather than tell the story of a vagrant drug addict. That speculation seems close to the mark.

Most of the narrative, such as it is, comes in bursts of prose poetry. These passages often explore grimy subjects--anonymous sex, petty theft, child abuse, missing relatives, low-budget drug abuse--with eerie, hallucinatory language. Krilanovich's prose is often quite beautiful, and I'm a sucker for the lovely/ugly juxtaposition that this book swings on.

That being said, it's basically impossible to construct a coherent tale from The Orange Eats Creeps' warbling text. Basic questions--who are the characters? where are they and what are they doing? are they vampires or just crummy kids?--frequently can't be answered conclusively. The narration switches from first to third person at the drop of a hat, and some of the themes advertised on the book's jacket (ESP, the Donner Party, a serial killer) hardly appear in the text.

For me, the best approach to this book has been to read it in fits and starts--a few minutes before bed, a few minutes in the subway going to work, a few minutes while eating lunch. Yes, this approach further fragments its already fractured aesthetic, but maybe that's the point.

When I listen to an extreme metal album, I often will only spin a song or two at a time. Sure, I lose the 'album' context, but that kind of music is really about moments--individual riffs, solos, drum fills. The Orange Eats Creeps works much the same way. It may not tell much of a story or tug at your heartstrings with conventional tactics, but Krilanovich's verbal riffing power is deeply impressive all the same.