The Virgin of Flames

November 6, 2006
An L.A. artist's search for identity forms the core of the diffuse but haunting new novel by Nigerian-born poet and Graceland
novelist Abani. Black is a 36-year-old muralist living hand to mouth behind the Ugly Store cafe in a bleak area of L.A. He's depressed and in an existential rut: engrossed in his latest work drawing on Catholic iconography (beaten into him as a child by his Salvadoran mother), and still smarting from the disappearance when he was a child of his African father (a NASA engineer) on a Vietnam-era space-related mission, Black feels he's being followed by ghosts—namely, the biblical Gabriel, the angel of annunciation. Sometimes he converses with Gabriel in the spaceship he has constructed in honor of his father above the cafe. Black is also deeply conflicted about his sexuality; a frequenter of female prostitutes, he has recently become obsessed with a local transvestite stripper, Sweet Girl. But Black's malaise may also stem from a curse—involving a malevolent spirit that kills male children—that his father wrote him about. It's a muddle, and it's difficult to care about the plot details. But Abani touches on the far reaches of psychic pain, religious and sexual, and creates a hallucinatory despair.

December 15, 2006
By imagining a Nigerian Elvis impersonator in " Graceland" (2004) and a girl subjected to brutal abuse in " Becoming Abigail "(2006), Abani has established himself as an unflinching advocate for individuals exiled to society's underside. His latest hallucinatory tale of audaciously improvised lives is set in Los Angeles, a place of epic yearning. As wildfires rage in the hills and ash falls from the sky, mural artist Black seeks transcendence in his work and confronts a long-resisted metamorphosis. The son of an Igbo father and a Salvadoran mother, Black is enthralled by a transvestite stripper named Sweet Girl, entangled with a pragmatic Rwandan refugee, and dependent on a famous psychic and proprietor of a coffee shop-tattoo parlor, where business has been booming ever since the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared on the roof. Redolent of the hunger and doom of Nathanael West, lush and surreal as L.A.'s street murals, and combustible with denied eroticism and thwarted spirituality, Abani's feverish portrait of a haunted artist embodies post-9/11 anxiety and the longing for peace.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)