>>REVIEW
CRIMEWAYS
Edited by Rita McBride and Matthew Licht
Arsenal Pulp Press, 169 pp.
Crimeways reads more like a piece of art than a collection of stories. It should come as no surprise that the mastermind behind the project is Rita McBride, a sculptor who is responsible for four books of a similar structure (Heartways, Futureways and Myways being the others). For this volume, she collaborates with Matthew Licht, a multi-talented writer of detective stories. Along with nine other contributors, they explore a post-9-11 New York cosmopolitan environment from the points of view of a motley collection of visionaries – artisans, spoken word artists and the often-overlooked-yet-particularly-entertaining art instructors.
While some books rely heavily on narrative structure, Crimeways functions in defiance of the conventional approach that stories need a beginning, middle and end. Aristotle might disapprove, but I think it’s fresh and fascinating.
The series of stories in Crimeways function separately and together to address art crime and 20th-century large-scale crime. It could be read as a response to 9-11, to Unabombers and suicide bombing, and to terrorism in general. But it is also wackier than that. What would happen if artists took their licences so seriously as to impact New York with such projects as blowing up the New York Public Library? On the one hand, they would create the same mayhem brought on by your average heavyweight criminal-terrorist. On the other, they could bring a new interpretation to large-scale destruction – the value of a rainfall of random words and phrases.
This book investigates a whole other realm of possibility in the unreality of crime. It pushes readers to think outside the box on the one topic that has most folks in the Western world trembling. Appreciate disaster from a different angle and you might start to inhabit a world like the eccentric characters that come up in this bizarre narrative landscape. |
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