Broken Pencil Issue 23
L.E. Vollick’s The Originals is an honest portrayal of the life or death questions poor urban youth face. Magpie, the book’s protagonist, trusts her community of fellow club-goers to look out for her. Her local, the Underground, is the first place she feels she belongs. But when it really matters, her scenester friends let her down.
While Vollick’s prose occasionally glimmers electric, The Originals needs a sharp edit with a ginsu knife to slice unnecessary repetitions and chop off hackneyed language. Witness cliches like "shaking his booty" and "we're all in it together" or groan-inducing descriptions where "everyone is having a ball."
Readers patient enough to wade through the swamp of flashbacks and tired phrases in the first few chapters will eventually find their way onto dirty downtown streets and vomit-stained, beer-scented bar stairs. They’ll stay up all night, drop acid at a drug dealer’s party, watch violent drunken fights and befriend nervous runaways.
Vollick’s novel construction is deft. She introduces micro-level concerns with first-person narration - Magpie describes what it’s like to be a kid petrified by media portrayals of nuclear war. She's a straight-A student who, after watching her single-mom’s minimum wage struggle, knows she’ll never be able to afford a university education. With the addition of some strategically placed details, Vollick successfully widens the scope to intelligent macro-level socio-political arguments around Reaganism and the North American class system.
Magpie and her friends cope with the feelings of inadequacy low-income people often experience. She begins to understand why people decide "it’s easier to hang themselves rather than tie up their shoelaces and make coffee in the morning," and decides that "the end of the world isn’t just one thing. It’s more like a chain gang that wears you down until the fireworks at the finale."
Vollick’s characters are interesting insofar as they go beyond merely questioning their immediate surroundings and consider how to improve things for themselves without numbing themselves to what’s really happening. It's the authentic punk rock street ethic many of us have forgotten or would prefer to ignore.
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