Honky,
by
Dalton Conley
University of California Press, Berkeley
www.ucpress.edu
231
pp.
Dalton Conley was a white kid, a wimpy white kid, who couldn't connect
with the African American gangsters and Latino hipsters he shared a needle-filled
courtyard and his childhood with. The only honky (besides his younger
sister and his parents who, incidentally, all adapted to their "minority"
status and the surrounding culture much better than he did) in a dirty
housing project in late 20th-century gothic Manhattan, Conley realized
at a young age that he belonged to neither the low-income neighborhood
he called home, nor the tonier and whiter Greenwich Village schools he
sometimes attended. In fact, not only did Conley not belong, but he was
also woefully uncool in both communities, choosing to hide his ghetto
background from his genteel white friends, while at the same time unable
to immerse himself in the rituals, language and games of the neighborhood
in which he lived. As a result, Conley cultivated the persona of an outsider--the
pasty boy who fits nowhere, who wanders both the junky and the ritzy playgrounds
alone, self-conscious, proud and scared.
Now an associate professor in Social
Science at NYU, Honky is Conley's attempt to come to terms
with this childhood. Conley explores his paradoxical identity as
a member of both a circumstantial minority--poor guy was never picked
for the sandlot baseball team because of his pale face--and the
cultural majority, specifically the larger, broader and more privileged
white (male) hegemony.
Conley's story could be compelling;
it has all the elements of a great Hollywood story--his best friend
gets shot and is paralyzed, he accidentally sets fire to another
friend's loft, his father is a gambler and an artist and his mother
is a flake and a writer. But the elements don't come together to
create a literary universe and Conley's prose is to blame. Halfway
through, the book begins to read like a litany of complaints, nay,
whines of a kid who thinks his parents really should've bought that
loft in Soho when they had the chance. Conley does attempt to complicate
his inherent position of class and racial advantage by revealing
that he is, in fact, aware of these advantages, and that, furthermore,
it is precisely these hidden and unfair advantages that his book
is interrogating. However, when he does this, the prose doesn't
rise above the level of a graduate student paper. For example, Conley's
observation that "the privilege of the middle and upper classes
in America [is] the right to make up the reasons things turn out
the way they do, to construct our own narratives rather than having
the media and society do it for us" is a sociology textbook
insight, not literary truth.
In addition to platitudinous thoughts
on race and class, the book suffers from clunky attempts at Literature.
Such sentences as "I had slipped into the darkness of the room
barely noticed, the way one might enter a Native American sweat
lodge after the ritual had already begun" and "Rahim's
death preyed on my sense of morality like a dark lesion" call
attention to their own awkwardness, as if announced by a dancing,
trumpet-blowing rhino. In his author's notes, Conley writes that
his book is a literary memoir, albeit one that is informed by sociology,
and not a scientific study. But, true to the story of his life,
the book is neither--it hangs between a dissertation and a work
of art, isolated and stuck between the black and white worlds of
literary truths and scientific observation, proudly unwilling (or
unable) to synthesize the best both have to offer.
That said, the book is an interesting
addition to the ongoing (and imperative) American conversation about
race, class, and the individual. Although it doesn't rise to the
literary standard set by Wright's masterpiece Black Boy or
even Nathan McCall's journalistic approach in Makes Me Wanna
Holler, it does offer a unique and often ignored perspective
on what it's like to grow up white in a community dominated in visible
and overt ways by color.
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