PETROCHEMICAL NOCTURNE

Wright’s experimental novel meditates on history and racism in the Deep South.

Welcome to Louisiana. This “Sportsman’s Paradise,” as the state motto has it, is a land with a complicated past, from its slave trade to the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 to its showcasing, and later removal, of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. This fictional journey begins around 2016 in Baton Rouge, the state capital, named after a “red stick” that was once used to demarcate a border. It’s home to a section called Standard Heights, a neighborhood that was once “a company town built for workers by Standard Oil at the turn of the last century.” Many streets in the neighborhood are named after Native American nations—which is odd, given past violence against them by white settlers. Its proximity to what is now a large ExxonMobil plant makes it less-than-prime real estate. It’s also a place that was once home to a man named Toussaint; the pollution was so bad when he was growing up there that his father wouldn’t allow the opening of any windows in the family home. As the narrator, a writer on an unusual quest, converses with Toussaint, the story becomes a personalized tour of Southern injustice. Items for discussion include everything from The Negro Motorist Green Book and lynching postcards to the 2017 Floyd Mayweather-Connor McGregor boxing match. The narrator eventually makes it to New Orleans in time to see the removal of the Lee statue; he reveals that he, himself, is a distant relative to an infamous historical figure. A photo of that man is included, among other images, such as of a crumbling interior of the abandoned Charity Hospital in New Orleans. It all amounts to a collage-like look at America’s troubling past.    

Wright’s novel progresses in a concentrated but rather plotless manner in long, dense sentences. The ExxonMobil site in Baton Rouge is described as “a city-state unto itself with its own body of rules and oral traditions maintained by an order of petrochemical priests.” Toussaint speaks of how he “summoned the catawampus courage to overcome the trepidation and the taboo, which had gripped me for years” against opening windows at home. The work abounds with such slow, poetic lines, and their tone works best when guiding readers through lesser-known aspects of the past. For instance, a floodgate system called the Spillway is described, intriguingly enough, as only having been opened 11 times. Yet the work’s unrelenting earnestness can make for some jarring moments that may take readers out of the story, as when Toussaint’s father is said to have taken him to watch the Spillway opening one spring so that he would “fear death by water,” and the aforementioned boxing match is sold as a racial conflict with “white frat-bro types and their blonde ratchets, pumping fists and cheering for McGregor to whipsaw Mayweather.” That said, although the work’s examination of history is unsubtle, readers will be left with more than a few uncomfortable emotions to mull over.

A bristling, lurching, and often insightful investigation of the past.