Note: This review purposely attempts to mimic the style of this book.

Review, March 2016.

No, I don't think so. Ban lies naked on my coffee table, a wooden tray on a leather ottoman. Someone covers it with paper. No one takes off their clothes. But we -- eat -- chew -- blink -- ignore -- [hold up cookies in our fists] "What kind of book is this, ma'am?"

At 7:40 p.m. I began to write -- but did not write. What would I have written if I had read a different book? It is interesting to write a review that failed. But I did not write a review. I am interested in reviews but not in the vulnerable way that most reviews open a carcass to the air and let it rot. Let small black intestines writhe from her stomach. Let them dissolve into the asphalt as an oily residue. I laid down -- curled on my side -- considered -- the cats are confused and extend small pink tongues to lick the tile -- the charcoal -- the outline of her body is mine. Then I stopped writing. I did not ever start.

I analyze my glimpse of incoherence.

From one angle, it is beautiful. It gleams with bizarre images. Performance art -- reduced -- to poetry. But trying to be a novel, it blackens, oozes. Becomes a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash). A girl walks home in the first few moments of a race riot and I am confused. I want to know what happens. Everything happens, and because everything happens, nothing happens. When it was time for such a thing, I could not bear to pick up the book.

She is naked on many pages and in many cities and I don't understand why. Nobody seems to see someone do this. Exhibitionism is the wrong answer but the colors all fit, or they are unfamiliar pinks. I want to feel the taste of logic on my tongue but is it copper wire? Is there a groin? [There are crackers on the table]

( )

The author is playing on a level of meta that is too refined for me to value as much as others do. Ban en Banlieue is, as far as I can tell, a self-reflective documentation of an attempt to write a novel, an attempt that is continuously thwarted with the vastness of the subject, and also, thwarted by the way the character, Ban, a brown girl, intersects with all known Literature. The author writes of her attempts to find an appropriate story for Ban to inhabit. Ban en Banlieue is a record of these attempts.

That is my best guess, at any rate. The problem I have, though, is that it's very easy for something to be too hard to write about. That's a given. Whenever a writer sits down to make something happen, it's really really hard.

As I read I felt a little bit like I've felt at political gatherings, when I've find myself in solidarity with the proponents of a worthy cause that I too believe in. Maybe it's just before a March or political protest; maybe just after one. Someone gets a hold of a microphone and we all listen, of course, with respect and unified clarity of vision. In those gatherings we will give respect to whatever person happens to be at the microphone at any given moment, no matter how rambling their delivery, because the cause itself is a good one. Reading Ban en Banlieue was like listening to a well-meaning but rambling speaker who believes in a worthy cause that I too believe in. ( )