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Hot Wire
Book by Brown, James
Mass Market Paperback
First published December 1, 1985
10 people want to read
About the author
James Brown
677 books121 followersJames Brown is the author of several novels, and the memoirs, The Los Angeles Diaries, This River, and Apology to the Young Addict (to-be-published March 2020). He is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction Writing and the Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The New England Review.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 29, 2017
Three Brothers:
James Brown's sophomore effort follows the fate of three young men, Lonnie, Sonny, and Alex, along with their mother, who's struggling to make ends meet as a waitress at a Denny's in L.A.
Lonnie is a car thief (which lends the book its title), while his brother Alex is a drug dealer who courts trouble by waving around his gun every chance he gets, and cutting cocaine with meth amphetamine and selling it around town. Sonny, the most mature of the three brothers, is working on becoming a professional actor in Hollywood, and has even done some small parts here and there.
"Hot Wire," like James Brown's other works, deals with the dread power of family and fate, with the sun-soaked backdrop of the California serving as a kind of metaphor for paradise just beyond reach. The characters live in the shadow of the City of Dreams, only it's the seedy reality of L.A., where graffiti scars the terrazzo tiles on the stars of the Walk of Fame, and kids go to Disneyland (but only by breaking in after hours, and while buzzing on cocaine and hard liquor). Brown's characters see the good life, but only at a distance, which makes it all the more torturous.
Reading Brown's work in reverse chronological order might have been a strange choice, since his best books are his most recent (with "This River" being my favorite work of his, and one of my hands-down all-time favorite reads), but early Brown is far from juvenilia; it only suffers in comparison to his later stuff.
The book is very period-specific, without being dated, and though it "head-hops" from multiple perspectives, shifting from the life of one brother to another, the rococo storytelling style never becomes too patchwork or scattershot. It's not my preferred method of storytelling, but Brown pulls it off seamlessly. Recommended.
James Brown's sophomore effort follows the fate of three young men, Lonnie, Sonny, and Alex, along with their mother, who's struggling to make ends meet as a waitress at a Denny's in L.A.
Lonnie is a car thief (which lends the book its title), while his brother Alex is a drug dealer who courts trouble by waving around his gun every chance he gets, and cutting cocaine with meth amphetamine and selling it around town. Sonny, the most mature of the three brothers, is working on becoming a professional actor in Hollywood, and has even done some small parts here and there.
"Hot Wire," like James Brown's other works, deals with the dread power of family and fate, with the sun-soaked backdrop of the California serving as a kind of metaphor for paradise just beyond reach. The characters live in the shadow of the City of Dreams, only it's the seedy reality of L.A., where graffiti scars the terrazzo tiles on the stars of the Walk of Fame, and kids go to Disneyland (but only by breaking in after hours, and while buzzing on cocaine and hard liquor). Brown's characters see the good life, but only at a distance, which makes it all the more torturous.
Reading Brown's work in reverse chronological order might have been a strange choice, since his best books are his most recent (with "This River" being my favorite work of his, and one of my hands-down all-time favorite reads), but early Brown is far from juvenilia; it only suffers in comparison to his later stuff.
The book is very period-specific, without being dated, and though it "head-hops" from multiple perspectives, shifting from the life of one brother to another, the rococo storytelling style never becomes too patchwork or scattershot. It's not my preferred method of storytelling, but Brown pulls it off seamlessly. Recommended.
Displaying 1 of 1 review