DH: A star is born, a raw red giant in the constellation of Queens, New York. Matt Burgess has such a great word vault that he seems at war with being a writer who is also such a great noticer. The prose turns a bit purple a times, like Matt is straining, eager to let his imagination loose onto the streets of his beloved Jackson Heights.
His central character is a drug dealer, Alfredo Batista, and such is MB’s sublime moral relativism that Alfredo is the hero of Dogfight. I promise that you will love him. Alfredo is worried, and all the gossip-heads in Jackson Heights would pay admission to see, what happens to Alfredo when his brother Jose, who has renamed himself Tariq, gets out of prison.
Alfredo has gotten his brother’s girlfriend Isabel pregnant and put Tariq out of the picture while he has been in jail. You can’t blame Isabel for making this switch. Tariq respects only violence and power. Alfredo has heart and is an artist of the streetwise.
MB inserts Tariq’s parole documents into the text. They recommend anger management sessions. Why do I find this funny? Tariq smashes bowling balls into people’s faces. Good luck with that anger management.
Also funny, because I have to laugh when it doesn’t seem appropriate to cry, is the “traditional gift” that Alfredo hopes will assuage Tariq’s anger, a generous supply of free drugs, sort of like the complimentary chocolate that might be left on your pillow in a nice hotel. Tariq, incidentally, is a chocolate fiend. His pockets are stuffed with candy bars. Kit Kat bars, Snickers, his favorite Charleston Chews, Mr. Goodbars, Hershey’s Kisses. His breath smells of it. MB is a detail man, God bless him. It helps the reader to pin down the characters. I’ll never forget, as long as I live really, the plush wooden parrots that Alfredo’s mother has hanging from strings on the ceiling of her apartment. I won’t forget her name either. It’s Lizette. It sounds like she’s named after some sort of furniture accessory…like…”oh, pull up the lizette and sit down”.
As MB flips the plot levers like a video game master, Alfredo and his drugged-out buddy Winston, he’s the GamePro magazine addict, get hold of some muscle, the youngest and most violence-prone of the “Alphabet” brothers (Alex, Bam-Bam, Curtis Hughes) to mug Vladimir, an immigrant Russian kid, and steal his drugs. They suspect V. is dealing outside his private school. The vacant stares of his classmates, the kid’s inexplicable popularity and his penchant for hanging out on street corners are strong evidence that this is true.
Gosh…how can I telegraph this to you…Matt Burgess cares. The quality that I admire most in fiction is intimacy, being close-up and accurate with your character’s feelings. Matt is an awesome detail man. Watch the streets of Queens come alive with a sense of real neighborhood, where even minor players are vividly in your face. Like the old lady who warns A. to stay hydrated during a blackout. Touched by the sympathy of a person who is basically helpless, he wants to walk her home for safety’s sake but knows she would be terrified with suspicion if, as a stranger, he offered.
But MB is a detail man about his characters feelings a well. I loved how in a argument, our couple seems to take turns being “for” or “against”. I loved how Matt can describe how a woman feels when she is pregnant. I loved how, in stressful situations, Isabel mentally leaves her body and tries to pretend she is somewhere else, like up on the ceiling. I loved that Isabel can imagine, while expecting, that her child-to-be, Christian Louis, can give her advice or tell her how he feels. I loved it that Matt can make a prosaic place like Queens, basically a support-borough for Manhattan, seem like the whole world because, like any community, it does seem like the whole world if you live there.
That’s why a novel called Dogfight really is a love story. Women readers, please, please, don’t be turned off by the D word. You’ll love this story. You’ll want to find out what’s happens to Isabel and Alfredo as much as the guys may want to find out what happens between Alfredo and his half-monster, half-human brother. This novel is a humanistic triumph, and in Queens, no less. Dogfight is scheduled as a Fall release from Doubleday.
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