Rage Is Back by Adam Mansbach (review)

Adam Mansbach’s Rage Is Back is an ode to a New York where teenage angst was best expressed through a can of Krylon Hot Raspberry or Aqua Turquoise. The novel is narrated by 18-year-old Dondi Vance, the biracial progeny of two graffiti legends. Recently expelled from the prestigious and predominantly white “Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy,” Dondi’s is fueled by a fresh round of resentment towards his former school, his mother, and life in general. The story begins as Dondi’s estranged father and graff icon, Billy Rage, mysteriously reappears in Brooklyn just in time to stop Anastacio Bracken’s campaign for mayor. Bracken, a longtime scourge of the graffiti world, and the killer of Amuse, Billy’s best friend and fellow member of the Immortal 5 graff crew, is positioned as a “tough on crime” representative of the ways in which NYC law enforcement and gentrification contribute to an overall whitening of New York.

The most effective aspect of the novel is the colorful glimpse into graffiti culture incorporated throughout the narration. Mansbach deftly illustrates how a generation of angry and marginalized teenagers found their voice through “burned” subway cars, and he speculates where the 80’s graff legends might be now. Mansbach has clearly done his graffiti research, and the novel is suffused with the language of hip hop and the graff lifestyle. Mansbach also tackles the taboo subjects of race and class privilege through Dondi, a product of 80’s graff culture living in a New York dominated by fancy coffee and bourgeois “cheese-loving motherfuckers.” In Dondi, a self-proclaimed “nerd with swagger” who is equally versed in the Odyssey and the iconic graff documentary Style Wars, Mansbach smartly positions hip-hop culture within the literary canon.

Less effective, however, are the half-baked elements of magical realism interwoven into the text. An apartment building staircase providing a 24-hour portal into the future and Dondi’s psychedelic Amazonian drug trip do little to further the plot. An allusion to a possible subway tunnel demon seems at first like an interesting segue between Rage’s training as a shaman and the underground life of graffiti art, but this connection remains unexplored, and there is no apparent relationship between Billy’s newly-cultivated spiritual powers and his former life as a legendary graff artist.

Like Dondi, Mansbach is a writer still working to find his voice. Just as Dondi appropriately remarks that there are “a lot of little technical things I didn’t even notice as a reader… already kicking my ass,” Mansbach leaves underdeveloped subplots throughout, while his characters at times seem more like caricatures. However, Mansbach’s wandering and irreverent prose is a souvenir of a New York fueled by spray paint and cocaine, and a witty commentary on the city’s changing social climate. The novel speaks to kids like Dondi, born into a grittier and more colorful New York, but also equipped with the tools to succeed in a changing and increasingly gentrified city.