FICTION

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON: by Ricardo Cortez Cruz (Fiction Collective Two and the University of Colorado: $18.95; 121 pp.). For many young African-American men, rap is the flip side of real life: While black rappers exude an electric, cocksure authority, many black men feel they lack it in real life; while black rappers do the shuffle, the cootie crawl, the funky chicken, the hard bop and the Pee-Wee Herman, many black men feel trapped, paralyzed and silenced. We are initially skeptical, then, of Ricardo Cruz’s attempt in this first novel to use the dream-weaving style of rap to depict real life. But to a large extent Cruz--a 28-year-old African American born and raised near Bloomington, Ill.--has succeeded. By writing and talking in rap, his characters may clothe their pain in layers of pretense, but surprisingly, this makes it all the more poignant. “I heard you crying all the way from 125th St.” Clive tells Flip. “I wasn’t crying,” Flip responds. “I was whistling.” “You was whistling, ‘Mommy, come get me out of here?’ asks Clive. “I was humming ‘Gone with the Wind.’ ” Too often, though, Cruz’s attempt to be literarily hip comes at the expense of honesty. His characterizations, for one, are shaky: At one moment, an inner-city man will be unable to conjugate verbs; at the next, he’ll be talking like the Illinois State University Ph.D. student that Cruz is. Cruz’s writing style, moreover, is too self-conscious to be as raw and revealing as his glowing jacket cover blurbs suggest: e.g., “Horrors hung out by the wire trash cans which were like fish nets on the edges of the street. Black pimps and hookers and charlatans became tuna, cat, mackerel, largemouth and walleye staring at me as I sailed passed the seamier areas of Compton.” Still, in the rap novel Cruz has discovered a clever and promising conceit, and he is generally able to back it up with vivid word pictures--characters reading Bazooka bubble gum fortunes and dressing black Barbie dolls under skies “gray and full of cement”--that buck the current trend of either glorifying or demonizing life in the inner-city.