Shuck

Daniel Allen Cox is brilliant with a picaresque vignette. He bobs and weaves through Shuck, throwing glimpses at the porn industry, New York City, gay sex and literary magazine submissions with steady grace, floating through the voice of Jaeven Marshall, aka the new Boy New York:

Daniel Allen Cox is brilliant with a picaresque vignette. He bobs and weaves through Shuck, throwing glimpses at the porn industry, New York City, gay sex and literary magazine submissions with steady grace, floating through the voice of Jaeven Marshall, aka the new Boy New York:

Why New York City is not America:

Because not everyone has a gun or thinks they need one, because the industrial smog that wafts over from New Jersey creates a sunset I want to lick off the sky, because people live in the subway, because some of the homeless live better than housed people in other cities.

Let’s be clear. This book is a raunchy romp. Jaeven Marshall wants to be a writer, but turns tricks to make money. His artist-landlord’s version of rent collection is painting pictures of Jaeven’s wounds when he comes home bloodied by a john. Jaeven’s favorite past time is scoping magazines like Inches and Honcho: The magazine for bears, bear-cubs and the men who love them. His drug of choice is methamphetamines.

What emerges here is an easily recognizable conflict. Jaeven Marshall is consumed by his addictions and his aspirations, and these collective consumptions threaten to undermine the emotional attachment that he may be developing for his artist-landlord Derek. There’s even an emotional baggage packed “you’ll-never-change and I-never-loved-you” scene near the climax.

But while much of this story is old hat – an aspiring writer struggles in the mean streets of New York City – there is a fresher narrative working alongside. The descriptions of New York City, its underbelly dwellers and the oldest of professions are nuanced and engaging. Cox is miraculous at exposition and narrative. Unfortunately, however, the dialogue in Shuck is a bit on the clumsy side as seen here in an exchange between Jaeven and Derek:

“Hi, Booger,” he said. “There’s some eggplant parmigiana in the oven. Pepper’s in the grinder.”

“Booger? Am I another one of your pets?”

“Don’t get testy. It’s just what…what people do.”

It’s not atrocious, but it is a little flat. And aside such rich narration, drenched in semen and covered with nudy magazine pictures, the dialogue has a tendency to get lodged in the throat.

Another downside to Shuck is the lengthy look at Jaeven’s writing attempts.

The kid wasn’t adapting well to reform school. He was an outcast from the moment he got there, but it was all for the better. If he was going to survive a place like that, he needed the resourcefulness of a lone wolf.

In morals class, they taught him about the importance of family. He sat through slideshows of mother father, daughter, son, image after image of the same perfect unit but with different actors every time . . .

And that draws on for several pages. I assume that Cox is drawing this technique from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, wherein Vonnegut describes the plot line of several of Killgore Trout’s novels. Vonnegut is referenced several times in Shuck, and at one point in the story Jaevin even tries to meet the writer at a reading, only to be thrown out of the bookstore. But where Vonnegut was whimsical with his delivery, Cox comes across as a bit anxious. He does, however, offer a brilliant summation of the endeavor of getting fiction published: “I’m doing my best to stay positive, but I have to tell you that trying to get published (a word I’ve grown to hate) feels like buying raffle tickets for a prize that’s already been given out by a church that’s already burned down.”

At his best, Cox is a brilliant story teller. He’s able to reduce human emotion into hot shots of truth that singe the guts and set heads to shaking. Dirty and glorious, Shuck is definitely a fun read. A book that’s as confident as its simple-stated narrator.