Ratz Are Nice (PSP): A Novel

Let's start with the title. Ratz are Nice. What the hell?
Rats survive and adapt; they run together in the lower parts where nobody wants to go, eat what nobody else wants to eat. Like the poor and lower classes, like Edison and the other characters in the book. Since that's the way things are, I say rats are nice.

Your first book, Wigger, was about co-opting someone else's culture, but the characters in Ratz seem more directed toward their own.
Ratz starts the way Wigger did. But this time Edison is deciding on stuff about his life with the "Dumbdumz." He realizes you can be a part of something without it stealing parts of yourself to be there. So it's about kids deciding to make this decision in life. They want to make that adult decision, right or wrong, and deal with the consequences.

Tell us about the world your characters inhabit.
We are in another failed "Reconstruction Period." There was the Civil War and the exploitation and lost hope of civility and equality. Then we had the overhyped civil rights movement followed by the big '80s Pomo divisive cultural revolution. The people in Ratz are the bastard children of all this. The have-nots are the only ones who've never gotten a voice, and everyone keeps saying they're speaking for them. What else could we get from the kids who grew up during this period, but them running a power move on things?

Some of them are pretty evil in a lot of ways.
I do think there is evil out there. They say that Victoria is the occult capital of North America, that it's the center of the pentagram and that there are places here which are right on the crossroads. You can call up evil or goodness in the middle of a crossroads. I think people have called up some wickedness. It's the underlying theme in the novel. The "Dumbdumz" reflect that. How distorted and twisted they have become. Edison knows that we don't have a "Buffy" to slay baddies nor do we have "Hellboy" or a John Constantine. Todd McFarlane is from around here. He created Spawn to fight that stuff but really it's up to an in

Ratz are nice(PSP) is an intelligent, wild and at times unbelievable commentary on sub-society deserving of attention and understanding. Cheers to Braithwaite for taking on such a monumental project and for completing it.


Might Work Better on Film   April 4, 2001
A. Ross (Washington, DC)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

What can I say? As a book, this is awful. The "startling multiethnic lyrical phrasing" that the jacket praises, just doesn't do the trick. And unless you're a glutton for wading through experimental writing, and annoying typography (hey, I used to be a book typesetter, I love innovate type work, this is just lame) it's boring. Somehow, I get the impression I might have actually enjoyed it if it had been a movie. There, I could have gotten into the rythym of the language and the lives a bit more, but on print it's a dud. And the story of two rival skinhead crews is fairly banal. I've yet to read any book about the skinhead subculture that rises above cliche or pulp fiction, and this is certainly no exception. The author's notes are sort of interesting, except that there are some errors and typos throughout (for example, the 2-Tone band is The Selecter, not The Selecters, the famous rocksteady producer is Sonia Pottinger, not Portinger), and the bit about hardcore is seriously flawed. I dunno, maybe Canadians, or homosexuals will get more out of it than I did. I'd be interested in seeing a movie of it though.


Ratz Are Nice   March 24, 2001
W. (Vancouver, BC)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Those who read Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite's first novel, the inexplicably overlooked Wigger, will recognize the Victoria writer's performative prose and irascible voice in his latest work. Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is the story of Edison, a black skinhead navigating the mean streets and meaner syntax of the skinhead/rudeboy scene (PSP stands for "pure street punk"). Braithwaite's narrative oscillates between first and third person, sometimes directing Edison's I outward, and at other times presenting us with an omniscient eye watching the various skinhead gangsters scheming and thugging 24/7. The narrative strategy works because the characters themselves exist in a continually shifting subcultural terrain: white skinheads who flirt with neo-Nazism but recognize that the culture they love is derived from Caribbean ska; black skinheads who are surrounded by what have become, to the dominant culture, symbols of white power; militaristic machismo fused with gay male erotics. The effect is something like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders shoved head-first through the identity politics looking glass; we come out the other side with a text whose hot-blooded postmodernism depicts a violence without the pretense of heroism, and a celebration of disenfranchisement without the clichés of identity-mongering (Braithwaite depicts Edison as shining shoes for a living without once playing the image for pathos). In Braithwaite's hands, skinhead/rudeboy culture becomes an exemplar of the psychic balkanization that comes with being black in British Columbia, a place that bars easy appropriations of Afrocentrism. Braithwaite does with the subculture what Attila Richard Lukacs, a visual artist who also eroticizes skinhead imagery, fails to do: Ratz Are Nice (PSP) offers more than a voyeuristic gaze, but takes seriously the realpolitik of the subculture, including what is at stake culturally, racially and sexually. The comparison to visual art is apt, partly because of the way Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is narrated typographically. Braithwaite's English is not only given to the reclamation of hip-hop phonetics, but font-play, idiosyncratic punctuation, and a layout that tells as much of the story as the words themselves. And like a literary Jean-Michel Basquiat, Braithwaite succeeds in mashing up our too-settled categories of prose and identity.