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Male
and female. Fire and water. The sacred and the commercial.
Enter
Black, a biracial artist and native of L.A., seeking to find
himself among the opposing forces he sees within himself and
in the city around him—African or Hispanic, male or female,
gay or straight?
While
seeking to paint a mural that portrays his perfect vision
of the Virgin Mary, he finds himself confronting his past
and gender in the form of the women who surround him. There's
Iggy, a psychic tattoo artist to the stars who gives Black
shelter at her parlor, The Ugly Store, where art comes to
life on people's skin. There's Sweet Girl, the transsexual
stripper who makes her living through illusions: the illusion
of sex and the illusion of her own femininity. And there's
Black's mother, seen only in flashbacks, who haunts Black
with her hateful words about his masculinity and her devout
Catholicism. The art, illusion, and spirituality that each
woman embodies merge and collide in the figure of Black.
Moreover,
he's being trailed by the Angel Gabriel—sometimes in
the form of a pigeon, sometimes in the form of a glowering
gargoyle—who wants to deliver an indecipherable message
that Black desperately doesn't want to hear. As brushfires
rage and the L.A. river surges in its concrete boundaries,
the contradictory facets of Black's life begin to merge together,
culminating in the book's final pages where everything becomes
one.
The
Virgin of Flames is a rich journey in prose through the
streets and landmarks of Los Angeles. Abani utilizes magical
realism in the visitations from Gabriel, but most of the book's
action is strange in the way that its setting is strange;
as the saying goes, some things happen "only in L.A." The
descriptions of Black's art provide some of the richest language
and show the contrasts and synthesis that mark the book's
flow:
Murals
of Montezuma at his local McDonald's buying a Big Mac;
mermaids draped on red couches, sometimes with legs and
a mighty python wrapped around their waists and dangling
down between their legs, sometimes with fish tails, with
eyes of passion and fire, eyes that could undo a man.
There was one of Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp heading
off into the concrete horizon. In another, an Aztec priest
held a young man bleeding to death while a car, gunfire
spitting from its windows, sped away into the city…
Black's
art is an exaggeration of his vision of Los Angeles: a world
where Aztec gods go to McDonald's, a world where mermaids
sometimes have legs. These grand, clashing visions emphasize
the more visceral conflicts taking place within Black. How
can he be a straight man if he wears dresses? How can he be
African if he speaks only English and Spanish?
While
the book drags in some sections of unrealistic dialogue between
Black, Iggy, and Sweet Girl, The Virgin of Flames is
overall an enthralling read. For fans of mythic and magical
Los Angeles-based writing—such as the work of Francesca
Lia Block and Kate Braverman—this is a surefire hit.
(June,
2007)
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