Book Review : Grant Wamack - Black Gypsies (2022)
I know next to nothing about Chicago. I can name all the sports teams that are based there. I also know about deep dish pizza and Al Capone, but that's it. It's as much of an American myth as it is a real place for me. It's also a character in Grant Wamack's short novel Black Gypsies. While I don't know the exact degree of realism Wamack's novel entails (because who fucking cares about realism when you're writing fiction?), but it painted an intoxicating portrait of a brutal and mysterious place that eats people's souls.
Black Gypsies tells the story of Marcus (also known as Ice), a bright, ambitious and self-aware young man who is surviving doing legally questionable activities like stealing car parts to sell them at a nearby junkyard. But survival is never guaranteed in the streets of Chcago, so when Marcus draws the wrong number in the dangerous game he calls work, Ice and his friend Gordo find themselves in the crosshairs of a very dangerous man.
The colour and the shade of the underworld
This is a very simple novel, but one that explores ideas that are atypical to crime fiction. Although armed and dangerous, these characters aren't only defined by their activities or their ambitions. For example, there’s very poignant scene near the end of the novel where a support character gets shots and there's this emotional goodbye scene where another character wraps him in his arms, cries and whatnot. This is not the type of scene you usually see in a crime novel unless a female love interest is involved.
Grant Wamack uses this simple, but beautiful phrase to illustrate the contrast of expressing love at the end of a life: Sly wiped a tear from his eye with his tatted knuckle, free hand still gripping his gun. This is a sentence anyone could’ve written, but the powerful contrasts of the tear, the tattoo and the gun exacerbate the unlikeliness and poetry of the moment. It shows you something that isn't supposed to happen within the stereotypical parameters of the genre. It requires creative vision to come up with ideas like this.
Although it has a proper intrigue, Black Gypsies really shines through its juxtaposition of interloper activities and banal depictions of everyday life in Chicago. There's another great scene that exemplifies what I'm talking about where Gordo is struggling to put pants on before a party while Marcus is making fun of him. Grant Wamack layers these moments with scene of great tension like a mad scientist in order to create a portrait of a place that is both impressionistic and otherworldly.
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I wouldn't call Black Gypsies a crime novel. It has elements of film noir in the tradition of Walter Hill and Richard Price, but also borderline surrealist moments of everyday life visibly inspired by Donald Glover's masterpiece Atlanta. It's both spare and rich. Both incredibly straightforward and oddly dense in its attention to detail. I've read Grant Wamack before and his prose in Black Gypsies dances like it never quite danced. It is nimble and as sensitive to the big, unlikely moment as it is to everyday stuff.
So yeah, this one is somewhat of a UFO that doesn't fit in any preconceived notion of what you might think it is. It's a disconcerting and uncomfortable experience, but in a pleasant way, like arthouse cinema is. It looks familiar. It feels familiar, but it doesn't hit any beats you expect it to hit. Black Gypsies is the perfect read if you're bored of crime fiction like I am or simply if you're looking for something original and imaginative that doesn't twist language in a written pro wrestling hold.
