ASPHALT

Playwright Rux’s first novel, a somber mood piece about two people who connect through music that raises them high above past traumas and present mayhem.

Place: Brooklyn. Time: The near future, just after a violent civil conflict that has upended half the Brooklyn Bridge and sent heavily armed teenaged soldiers swarming into the streets. The principals: Racine, a DJ, and Couchette, a dancer and stripper. He spins for her in a makeshift club in a ravaged mansion owned by a dying Puerto Rican holy woman. Racine has just returned from France, where he was visiting a high-school buddy now in the music business; the trip ended badly. He is extraordinarily tight-lipped, but it’s possible to mine some biographical nuggets from the disjointed narrative. Born in 1976, he was raised in Virginia by a drunken Bible-thumping uncle and later in New York by a foster mother, whose neglect led to the loss of his testicles. He had an older brother who died in a fall off a cliff. The only constants in his life were house fires, one of them set by his reprobate uncle. Couchette’s story is relatively straightforward. She’s the daughter of a jazz musician who owned the mansion until he shot himself when Couchette was little. Her mother moved to Bali, remarried, returned to Brooklyn with another child, and died in the local playground, just like that. These background details hardly make Racine or Couchette more fully dimensional. The bottom line, relentlessly underscored, is that they are lost souls for whom music is the only salvation: “War is not unbearable. What is unbearable is the absence of music and dance.” The story climaxes with yet another fire, this one at a new disco under the bridge.

Through a patchwork of influences ranging from hip to hip-hop, gothic to post-apocalyptic, the author struggles to find his own voice and vision but ultimately sinks into incoherence.