Review by Booklist Review
First-time novelist Lombardo's bravura improvisation on The Odyssey begins in an improvised shipping-container palace on Los Angeles' waterfront, where Karmann Ghia watches her rent party veer out of control while she waits for the return of her lover, Americo Monk. A self-described urbanologist who wanders the city, filling his notebook with the graffiti filigreeing L.A. in an ever-morphing map of gang territories and political protest, Monk is trying to get home, but this is August 1965 and the Watts riots have ignited. As Karmann fends off lecherous suitors, Monk's journey across the siren-shrill, blazing city is repeatedly interrupted by gangsters, cops, temptresses, and seers hoping to seize his precious graffiti Baedeker. Lombardo tosses off Odyssey markers and channels Thomas Pynchon and Colson Whitehead as his hero contends with surreal and dangerous encounters with the Nation of Islam, voodoo practitioners, a one-eyed drug lord, and Godzilla. Despite some forced notes, Lombardo has created an exuberantly cartoonish, incisive, and suspenseful tale of an erupting city and an earnest street scholar intent on making us see the writing on the walls. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lombardo's auspicious but exhausting debut breathlessly tracks Americo Monk's tortured journey through Los Angeles during the 1965 Watts Riots. Monk is an overt nod to Odysseus, not a warrior but a scholar of graffiti. He documents the beautiful, portentous runes tagging his burning city, putting down drawings and notes in a blue notebook he nearly gives his life to save. As Monk staggers southward through the mayhem toward his home on the harbor, he encounters, among myriad others, members of a cult of Muslims called the Fruit of Islam, Chinese gangsters at war over fortune cookies, a Japanese woman claiming to be propaganda mouthpiece Tokyo Rose, various voodoo priestesses, brutal cops, and a stranger named Tyrone, "the blind madman with the satellites and ringing phone booths," likely a stand-in for Homer himself. Monk's girlfriend, Karmann, waits, like Penelope, among men who want her, her needle that of a record player, marking the time until Monk returns. Everything in this novel is a reference to something else: Media Environmental Displays, USA, a billboard company advertising addictive skin-lightening products, is just one of many clever examples. The language and story are bloated, which softens the impact the novel could've had. Nevertheless, Lombardo's voice is promising, and readers will be intrigued to see what he comes up with next. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
[DEBUT] In Lombardo's ambitious debut, self-styled urbanologist Americo Monk (who's fascinated by gangs and graffiti) makes his dangerous and continually interrupted way to pregnant girlfriend Karmann Ghia and their harbor-based, cargo-container home through the seething Watts riots of 1965. It's quite an odyssey-and in fact it's inspired by the Odyssey, though Lombardo doesn't belabor parallels. With the cops after him and his graffiti-filled notebook, Monk encounters slightly threatening Nation of Islam adherents, Las Sombras gang members, a wise black man working for pest control, Lotus Palace Restaurant workers who drug him, a legendary tagger and his tough-smart girlfriend, and Godzilla, in the midst of a movie remake ("He's almost not surprised at the hallucination, just one more aberration in this endless night of fire, signs, and wonders"). Voodoo-ish old Mab explains that he's a wanderer, and of course it's the journey that counts, as the sometimes surreal narrative effectively captures the era's politicized anger as it frankly, even cheekily, portrays Los Angeles's various ethnicities and craven white panic, making readers themselves urbanologists. Yet it also tracks the turnings of one man's soul. Verdict Brilliantly written if overwritten, absorbing if decidedly overlong, glorious if imperfect, this book is a conundrum. Readers whose tastes range from high literary to smart urban fiction will find it a trip and Lombardo a writer to watch. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/27.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The 1965 Watts riots become the backdrop for one man's journey through a long night of terror, wonderand semiotic inquiry.Americo Monk sees himself as "kind of an amateur urbanologist," an aficionado of artistic vandalism (aka graffiti), and an underground researcher into the myriad street gangs which declare whole sections of Los Angeles as their armed camp. On the evening of Aug. 11, 1965, when white police make a traffic stop in the streets of predominantly black Watts that sets off a powder keg of pent-up resentments, Monk had been roaming nearby, scribbling random arcana into the notebook that's never left his side. Now he's been swept up in the fiery chaos of the city's worst race riot, far from the home he's made with his pregnant girlfriend, Karmann Ghia, near an abandoned cargo depot along Los Angeles Harbor. So begins Monk's rowdy, near-hallucinatory search for a way back "south, toward the harbor." Throughout Monk's odyssey, he's buffeted and bounced through a series of heart-stopping perils and exotic diversions. Besides the inevitable hassles with LAPD detectives, two of whom covet Monk's notebook for its gang-related info, the people Monk encounters along the way include a phlegmatic "mosquito abatement" officer going about his business in the back alleys, short-tempered Chinese gangsters who've waged bloody all-out war over fortune cookies, a Nation of Islam contingent led by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad himself, and even the notorious Tokyo Rose as she's lugging a bag of jazz LPs to her house. As Monk dodges and weaves his way through the festering, sweltering maelstrom, Karmann, depicted as a kind of Penelope to Monk's Odysseus, tries to keep some kind of order during an unruly rent party. In his debut novel, Lombardo, who flashes impressive stylistic chops throughout, seems to be aiming for his own jazz-inflected version of a Joycean "night town" ramble infused with history, urban legend, dark comedy, and mythological tropes. Sometimes he gets carried away, though. If, for instance, Edward R. Murrow was really doing a CBS newscast on TV three months after he died and four years after he quit the network, then the novel really is a hallucination trumping actual history.Maybe Lombardo's hip-shooting imagery is part of the point he's making: history as a nightmare from which these characters are trying to awake. And nothing in a nightmare is supposed to make sense. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
