Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack is a beautiful book. It is not a book for the faint of heart, but it might be good to read anyway for those who’d rather bury their heads in the sand, or medicate themselves into a false rosiness (just as the mother in this story does). Cozy this is not. Tragedy it is. The kind of happenings it raps on could well be heading to a future near you, even though some of the elements of this near future tale date it to the time it was written, 1991. Kids connecting over payphones and landlines are part of my own fond memories so I was happy to read about them talking on the house phone anyway. These tech anomalies don’t matter too much in the end, because they aren’t the focus of the tale. This is science fiction of the social variety.

This was also my first time reading anything by Jack Womack. I’m glad I did because his command of the language in service to story is one of the things that made this book so beautiful. It is diary fiction. Specifically, the diary of a twelve-year old girl. I don’t imagine it is all that easy getting into the head of a twelve-year old girl myself. Writing from that first person perspective, in an extremely believable and absorbing voice was itself a major literary feat. The way he encoded her language with sprinklings of slang and the jargon of her day in the beginning, and the way her voice changed over the course of her violent awakening from sequestered private school girl, to open-eyed reveler in the harsh realities of economic survival and the ways of street, makes for a poetic breathtaking page turner.

“The whole West Side updown sounded livewired with gunshots and sirens and shouts and all the effects you get up here but now they played down the length.”

She writes to the diary as if it were a person named Anne. “Holidays pain your soul so Anne you always think where you’ve been and who with every year counting back and when they’re gone like this year the ache won’t stop. Even when weren’t moneyed here everything safed long as…”

The way Womack handles dialogue is a joy too, as Lola recreates her conversations in her diary. He might be writing about hard things, but he does so in an artful way. So what are those things he is writing about? There are so many themes to touch on in this book, and I want to encourage others to read this underappreciated speculative gem, so I won’t go into every detail. What follows are parts of the story that captivated my mind.

Lola is the daughter of a TV and movie writer, and an intellectual mother in New York City. They are starting to experience the nasty effects of economic downturn. Yet they still have enough at the beginning of the book to send Lola and her younger sister to private school. Things aren’t right in the United States of this book. Riots and crazy people are doing violent things to others on a regular basis. It’s become so common the violence is normalized. The kids see these things in Central Park one day when Lola goes out with her school friends after class. Along the way they see a homeless man get set on fire, but they continue on as if nothing big has happened. Meanwhile they can see the smoke rising from other parts of the city where the riots are in full swing.

One of her friends gets in trouble doing some stuff with a guy, some minor drugs, having a little party. She gets sent to a place the other classmates have already been talking about: Kure A Kid. As a late Gen Xer I remember full well the nightmare of the “troubled teen industry.” I had first hand experience of a place known as Kids Helping Kids, which operated in southwestern Ohio and Northern Kentucky. I wasn’t sent to this place myself, but two family members I am close to were sent there, and I attended some of the meetings they had for family as a grade school kid, among other things. To say it was culty is perhaps the least of the issues surrounding these programs. Yet the culty aspect is hardwired into them. Many of these programs can be traced in the way they operate directly back to the Synanon sobriety cult.

When I was in junior high there was a girl from a suburban school I became friends with at a weekend writing workshop aimed at encouraging kids who were deemed to have some literary talent. We bonded over zines and she was into the Riot Grrrl stuff coming out at the time. That was right around the time this book was written actually, or just after it came out. I lived in the city and introduced her to the punks and zinesters I knew, many of whom were older than me. After she came into town, and hung out with one of the older girls, something must have happened, because this girl was sent into a “treatment program” and I never heard from her again. Another close friend of mine, when his behavior was “out of control” was sent to a militaryesque Baptist boarding school.​

​Back then I was a big fan of the pop-punkers Screeching Weasel. I didn’t know it until recently, but it turns out Ben Weasel, the founder and singer in the band had been sent to the very troubled Élan School. Knowing people who got sent away on a regular basis, it was no wonder so many of us rebelled so hard. Yet the institutional adults who decide what goes into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders made rebellion a psychiatric disease as well: Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Call me defiant, but I could tell some more stories on this topic, but for those interested I recommend the book, Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids by Maia Szalavitz. You could also check out the newer The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach. 

The fact that this novel had an element of the troubled teen industry as part of its plotline only engrossed me further. Though there were many other places like Kids Helping Kids around the country at the time, Womack was originally from Lexington, Kentucky, just over an hour south of where I live. I wonder if Kure A Kid was modeled at all on Kids Helping Kids? It was certainly modeled on the many abusive behavioral modification programs happening around the country. The main characters friend Lori is out of luck when she gets sent to Kure A Kid, and when she comes back, she won’t even talk to Lola, or their other friend Katherine. She doesn’t talk much at all. Appears to be zonked out on heavy drugs that give her a blank faraway look. Yet, supposedly these places were supposed to help troubled youth get away from drugs. All too often, like in this book, they just prescribed them something to keep their vital energies sedated, while doing nothing to actually help them.

As the story progresses daddies writing gigs dry up and the bills start mounting, as do creepy calls from some money collector. The family has to move from their posh multiroom apartment close to the private school, to a place closer to Harlem where the rioting is really underway. They now live in a neighborhood where gangs walk the streets, and where they just manage to scrape by with her fathers meager paycheck from his new job as a clerk at a bookstore, where he works long hours for an abusive manager. He is hardly ever home anymore to see his wife and kids. Mom is editing manuscripts for a small bit of dough, and she was already taking lots of medicine for her anxiety, but it now seems to have gotten dialed up and up. She is checked out, numbed, medicated, hopeful in a way that is not practical.

Meanwhile Lola’s little sister is afraid of her older sister now, because of rumors that started about her being queer after it was let out that she kissed her friend Katherine. Too bad that information got out only by Katherine’s father talking to another parent at the private school about seeing his daughter kissing Lola. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been spying on them. When Lola gets branded as a dyke, it is what starts Lola’s dissociation with her friends at the private school. Soon she starts making new friends in her new neighborhood. Friends who have street smarts and get up to petty crime, who hang out and sometimes squat in abandoned buildings. Squatting in an abandoned building is better than living with abusive parents after all. She starts hanging with girls who might be queer too. Girls, who, though just a few years older, have a lot more experience with the gritty side of life.

Meanwhile, it seems as if every other week the president is getting assassinated and a new one has to be installed. New York City is under martial law, and the “greenasses” or army is in the street trying to keep order where the police failed. Further tragedies descend upon her parents, who do little to protect her. They are trying to keep their kids fed and housed, but it seems like they could have been doing more. In the end, the little sister is farmed out to the mother’s sister Chrissie who lives in some kind of Christian fundamentalist gated community. The younger sister is fine with that. She wants to go out there, where it is safe, and be a breeder.

The interpersonal dynamics of the girl gang Lola falls in with, the Death Angels, have their own troubled reality. Trouble finds trouble for these really troubled teens. Kure A Kid won’t help them, even if their broke ass parents could afford it. The society around them is crumbling and violent. The only thing left for them is to fend for themselves as another economic crash unfolds and civil unrest multiplies.
Told in blistering and beautiful bursts of pain bubbles, and the joyful excitement of youth, Random Acts of Senseless Violence may be a book over thirty years old. It’s really just now entering adulthood. Like all great SF, it speaks not only to the time it was written, but to the readers of today. It’s not really the teens who are troubled, it is the world that is troubled.
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“Everything downcame today Anne the world’s spinning out and I spec we finally all going to ride raw.”