July 10, 2008
JOHN LAZOO
John Reyer Afamasaga
AND FICTION (2007)
ISBN: 9780980348606
John Reyer Afamasaga’s first novel, “John Lazoo,” is his most accessible, and I recommend reading it before tackling the rest of his growing body of emotional and techno fiction. While Afamasaga likes to toy with the reader, he also has the ability to create tender emotional scenes, humor grounded in irony and modern culture, and a sense that the world would be a little more fun if he operated with more whimsical manipulation. . of reality used in his fiction.
The plot of “John Lazoo” is not complicated. James Elton, after a troubled childhood and the death of his mother, decides to take the name of a character from a poem that his mother read to him. This is how John Lazoo was born. From this point on, the novel plays with questions of personal identity, the difference between fiction and reality, and what is truth.
Newly appointed John Lazoo arrives in New York City, where he quickly becomes part of a fast-moving crowd that includes Hariss Clariss, a wealthy man who instantly falls for the handsome man in front of him. Soon, John will be working for Clariss as a gigolo; some readers may find the sexual scenes more graphic than they wish. Lazoo is cold towards his clients, but soon he meets the beautiful woman Genisis Jones and falls in love with her.
While Afamasaga tends to be satirical, his love scenes are romantically moving: as the lovers fall in love, the reader falls in love with the characters due to their mutual tenderness. Afamasaga has stated that his goal is for readers to fall in love. when reading his novels and here he achieves it, seducing us with a beautiful prose. These effective love scenes corroborate Lazoo’s motivations throughout the rest of the novel. He now wants to get out of his gigolo lifestyle so he can run away with Genisis. However, he has been commissioned for the lead role in retelling the life story of Hariss Clariss. When he refuses to play the part, Lazoo suddenly finds himself accused of murder.
Afamasaga enjoys playing with the border between life and fiction. While his other novels “WIPE” and “Illicit Blade of Grass” are intertextual and rely on readers meeting the characters from the previous novels, in “John Lazoo” the comparison is between life and film. Early in the novel, Lazoo comes home from his daily sex job to watch movies that begin to color his view of life. He thinks of himself as the star of a movie with everyone else as extras in the movie. Like a director planning a scene and considering how viewers will react, Lazoo envisions how the everyday can be reshaped into his desired cinematic life:
He went to the window and looked at the green grass, the golden sun illuminating the park… He saw himself doing something in that area; the activity he wasn’t sure about. The nature of the activity would be hilarious to one viewer but harrowing to another, perhaps prompting another yawn. He waited for the movie menu to change to the current listings and watched the long shadows creep into the darkness over the park that brought the lights to life and formed a skyline of the buildings that had cast the shadows earlier.
The credits rolled back on the screen to the reel they came from, and the director made sure that all the names and their works remained on the can and on the screen. Lazoo thought about the lines and the plot. The main character was good in the sense that he was central, the anchor and the reference point of everything that was said out loud and was not said inside, which came from him.
When Lazoo meets Genisis, he realizes that “he hadn’t yet contemplated a co-star to share his court with, so he looked up and decided to let someone else take the lead for a moment. After all, she could even have been good enough for him to follow and therefore support.” Meeting Genisis makes Lazoo yearn for a better role in life. While his love for Genisis motivates his refusal to play the role of Hariss, Lazoo is also obviously concerned about playing the role of his own choosing, writing his own life script rather than allowing someone else to play it. more believe it. He decides that neither he nor Genisis will be manipulated as fictional characters: “I will take the hand of a certain Genisis Jones and lead her from this story to an altar away from the lenses, the wandering eyes, and the growing appetite of the viewers that the editors seek to please.” “. for the manipulation of such a pure love”.
Once Lazoo is charged with murder, the plot slows down but the humor picks up as the judicial system is lampooned. The differences between truth and fiction are again explored. Lazoo’s defense attorney, Reyer, tells the jury, “If I had tried to fabricate evidence, we would still be seeing people on the witness stand being manipulated by my colleague and myself. Yes, manipulated. A harsh word to say.” what we do as lawyers, but a true description of our craft. The media also tries to distort the truth in the novel, to create the story they want instead of the story that the characters, or are real people, have already created to themselves.
Saying how the trial ends would spoil the story. More interesting to me than the conclusion is how the novel opens up to future novels. While the movies often have cheesy cliffhangers or hints of a sequel, no hint of future books is given in “John Lazoo.” However, the character of Metopheaz, barely mentioned in “John Lazoo”, appears in “Illicit Blade of Grass”, where he is famous as a co-author of the novel “John Lazoo”. Ironically, someone else has written Lazoo’s life. I love the irony of this twist: James Elton becomes a character in a poem who then tries to define himself while others try to define his role and when he thinks he has managed to create his own identity, despite a controlling boss, the law, the media, ends up becoming the main character of a book: Afamasaga’s game shows that the possibilities are endless, the lines of fiction and reality constantly blurred. I find it charming.
I encourage readers to give “John Lazoo” a try. It is experimental, showing the potentials of the future of fiction without showing its mechanical seams like many other postmodern novels. The novel can be downloaded for free at John Reyer Afamasaga’s website http://www.etfiction.com. Also be sure to read the interview with John Reyer Afamasaga here on Superior Book Promotions.
– Tyler R. Tichelaar, doctor and author of “The Marquette Trilogy”
