Kurt Wenzel: Gotham Tragic
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, April 2004]
Heartless and a bit snickering, Kurt Wenzel’s Gotham Tragic (Little, Brown) is stuffed with a mood-downing number of mock-worthy characters. At the center is writer Kyle Clayton, who, in addition to being despised in NYC for his post-smash belligerence after writing “arguably the novel of his generation,” is now getting a fresh round of looks for his half-assed conversion to Islam, the faith of his wife, Ayla. He’s surrounded by more characters at whom we’re intended to enjoy laughing: the racist multi-millionaire Lonny Tumin; Kyle’s hissing, headset-wearing agent Patience; a bitter waiter named Urlich (“a corona of failure seemed to hang over him”); bar patrons described as “dead-eyed blonds and jelly-haired goons, music-television holograms of the brutally stupid”; a chunky, wheezing Southern lawyer whose heft is reinforced with a scene of him eating the scraps from a restaurant’s kitchen; and even a few out-of-touch wealthy wives trying to throw a New Year’s party. So, I kept wondering, what to do when I tire of mocking?
The basic story—interesting if a bit familiar——is Kyle’s writing funk and even more serious marriage funk. “American, overeducated, atheistic to the core,” Kyle isn’t too well received by his wife’s family—“a gob of spit in her father’s beard” is how Wenzel gives it to us, with typical vitriol. While there are a few compelling pages fueled by actual religious discussion between the married couple, and some perceptive commentary on Kyle’s own reading of the Koran, Wenzel often falls back on supplying his main character with defining lines like this one, spewed to his better half at an explosive family gathering: “I’m going to go back out there and punch your Ali Baba right in his fucking face.”
Ready for some light? We got two small rays, in decent Don Westly, the racist Tumin’s underling who is well described as “the most expensive babysitter in America,” and Erin, a past fling of Kyle’s who’s got an “acting dream” but is still waitressing, at the ultra-sheik restaurant City, something of a town square for the novel. Oddly, Wenzel’s at his best when he’s detailing not Kyle’s writerly world but the insular world of the waitstaff. Here’s one customer/hostess scene: “The hostess smiled an absolutely winning full-lipped grin that managed to be obsequious and mocking at the same time. As for looking like an asshole, her smile intimated, the matter had been settled long ago.”
For me, this bit illustrates a key problem I had with the novel: even in its best parts, Gotham Tragic feels too fueled by contempt to really like, a slick round of insults dealt to everyone around the table. So should I take it less seriously and just enjoy the sour jokes? It’s tough, when many of them offer neither wit nor reward. Whether it’s the introduction of a Chinese nymph named “Wey Tu Young” (a joke the author humps twice), or some stale lines about sex after marriage, I soon started feeling as insulted as the characters.
By the novel’s end, the key characters’ lives are all intersecting. After angering the Muslim community with a published piece called “The Counterfeit Conversion,” Kyle separates from Ayla and is off writing a profile of Tumin, whose wealth and power are in jeopardy. Erin’s a few steps closer to realizing that acting dream, while Westly’s closer to getting out from under his boss’ villainous shadow.
In its final pages, after a restaurant massacre that sends Kyle to the hospital, Gotham Tragic makes a hard turn into what was designed to be a satisfying moment of heart-felt closure. Kyle, reunited with Ayla and blessed with a baby whose name means “peaceful” in Turkish, is made to morph into a loving father and understanding, yet independent-minded, husband. There’s a strained scene involving Kyle, new babe in his arms, asking the neighborhood hoodlums to keep it down. (They respond by calling him “gramps,” which he reflects on in his new wisdom.) I think there will be readers for whom this transformation works, but I just couldn’t swallow it. And while it may seem to be what I’d been waiting for, the ending felt both unearned and unreasonable, like an invitation to snuggle from an absolute stranger.
