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Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn’t it a classic of the field?

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Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn’t it a classic of the field?

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Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn’t it a classic of the field?

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Published on July 25, 2008

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Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Viokence is one of my favorite books, and indeed, one of the favourite books of everybody who lives in this apartment.

Outside of this apartment, I only know a handful of people who have even heard of it. It always strikes me as strange when there’s something like that, a book that’s brilliant and ought to have been seminal, a book that clearly should have set the world alight and yet sank with barely a ripple. 

Random Acts is written in the form of the diary of Lola Hart, a twelve year old girl in a near-future New York City. As the book progresses she changes from being a sweet middle-class child to a robbing murdering street girl as society changes around her. Presidents are assassinated and money is devalued and martial law is declared as she worries about her sexuality and groans about being forced to read Silas Marner for school. At the start of the book she’s writing in standard English with the occasional odd word choice, by the end she has progressed into a completely different dialect, and you have progressed step by step along with her and are reading it with ease. I can’t think of a comparable linguistic achievement, especially as he does it without any made up words. (Random example: “Everything downcame today, the world’s spinning out and I spec we finally all going to be riding raw.”) I also can’t think of many books that have a protagonist change so much and so smoothly and believably. What makes it such a marvelous book is the way Lola and her world and the prose all descend together, and even though it’s bleak and downbeat it’s never depressing.

So, why haven’t you read it?

[More below the cut…]

There are four reasons I can think of.

First, it might be because it didn’t get much attention. It had some reviews, but it wasn’t even nominated for any awards. It was published in 1993, in Britain first, by HarperCollinsPublishers, and then in 1995 in the US by Grove Press. This probably messed up its award eligibility. I was just looking on the Locus index of awards, and I saw that Womack’s previous and (only slightly less terrific) Elvissey won the Philip K. Dick Award and was on the short list for the Locus Award, but Random Acts doesn’t seem to have been nominated for anything. It would have been eligible for the 1993 BSFA Award in Britain, which was won that year by Christopher Evans’s Aztec Century, thus proving that there’s no accounting for taste. 

Secondly, it might be because it has had singularly appalling covers. The original British hardcover was fairly bad, but sufficiently appealing that I got it out of the library on a cold day just before Christmas 1993, when I was feeling particularly desperate for something to read. The paperback covers — British and US — are just eye-gougingly awful. Despite having already read it and loved it I recoiled from the British cover. I’ve had friends who sounded intrigued by my description of the book change their minds when they actually see it.

Thirdly, it might be because the title is offputting. You may have noticed I haven’t been calling it Random Acts of Senseless Violence every time I mention it, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not a bad title for the book, but it’s offputting for the kind of people who would enjoy it. It’s also offputting, according to some Amazon reviews, to the kind of people who would really love a book with that title and don’t want the diary of a twelve-year old as the world goes to hell around her.

It seems to me that the purpose of the title and the cover are to help the book find its friends. This hasn’t worked here. I’m the only person I know who started the Dryco series (which also includes Terraplane, Heathern, and Elvissey) with Random Acts, the rest of the handful of people I know who have read it read it because they already loved the others. Yet it’s the first — chronologically — and the best place to start. 

Now awful covers, a worrying title and no attention are damning enough for a book, but I think the thing that really relegated it to such undeserved  obscurity is that it was a novel that didn’t meet the zeitgeist. It didn’t meet the expectations of what SF was supposed to be doing. It doesn’t fall into an easy category and so it’s hard to sell. The UK edition has a William Gibson quote on the back that says “If you dropped the characters from Neuromancer into Womack’s Manhattan, they’d fall down screaming and have nervous breakdowns.” Gibson said that, and he meant it in a good way… but in the late eighties and early nineties Gibson was what people were looking at and cyberpunk was what they were expecting, with the New Space Opera just starting to come along to replace it. Gibson’s affect is very cool, very noir, and that of his imitators even more so. What Womack was doing was hot and realistic and emotional, as well as edgy and weird. It didn’t quite fit, so people didn’t know how to take it — and very few of them did take it. I think it might do better today in today’s more fragmented SF field, but in 1993 being totally astonishingly brilliant clearly wasn’t enough.

About the Author

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
Learn More About Jo
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16 years ago

Also, if I did pick it up in a store or the library to flip through it despite the title, I’d have turned to somewhere in the middle and likely have been put off by the fact that I wasn’t reading comprehensible English, given what you say about the language changing throughout the book.

So it sounds like this is a book that really has to be advertised by word of mouth. And now you have!

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Richard T.
16 years ago

I completely agree, Random Acts of Senseless Violence is one of my favorite (SF) books ever. My brother and me are big time fans of the book. You’re right, it’s kind of a mystery why this book is so unknown. The cover of the copy that I have (The UK softcover) isn’t that bad.
I also like Elvissey a lot, but I have never read Heathern. I probably should. I just wish that Jack Womack would write more. I guess that his daytime job takes up all this time nowadays.
BTW, also a big fan of Farthing an Ha’Penny.

Richard T.

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jmk
16 years ago

I read it and thought it was terrific. I sought out a copy because of what you’d written about it somewhere on usenet.

Listen to Jo, folks!

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16 years ago

Yes, it’s all the things you say – hot, realistic, emotional, edgy and weird – and I also found it uncomfortably voyeuristic, particularly the way Lola experiments sexually as a young teenager. I also found her ‘descent’ into gang life too rapid and too far gone, but having said that it’s clearly meant to be very much a raw and even slightly eviscerating experience, things happen so quickly to her.

I know no one else who’s read it, and to be honest I’ve never recommended it to anyone – I’m far more likely to recommend Disch’s ‘334’, which it reminded me of (and which coincidentally I’m re-reading now, and I can still hear the echoes).

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Brother Phil
16 years ago

I remember finding this in my local library – mindblowing. It’s a book that leaves you hating the world, and perfectly happy so to do. (well, until it wears off, anyway).

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Connatic
16 years ago

I have read it and have long considered it a classic in the field. Glad to see it getting some attention.

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Greig Christie
16 years ago

I own the 1994 UK paperback release of the book. I’ve got it in front of me right now. The cover is a garish mess right enough but I remember buying it on the strength of the blurb on the back of the book – it just sounded very intriguing.
I’ve not read it again since I first got it but my memory is that I found it slightly disappointing and I never bought another Jack Womack book.
However I think I’ll be giving it another go after your interesting reappraisal.

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Tracey C.
16 years ago

“I can’t think of a comparable linguistic achievement, especially as he does it without any made up words.”

I presume that the disclaimer is to meant to disqualify _A Clockwork Orange_, which is the first thing that came to mind for me. (Although I’m not sure Russian slang counts as made-up, per se.) There’s also an Asimovian short story that turns language usage upside down by the end, ever there’s a lovely children’s book called _Ella Minnow Pea_ that gradually eliminates letters of the alphabet from the speech of the characters entirely as the book progresses (tied directly to the plot).

Of course, my all time favorite “take your brain and have it working sideways by the time you’re done reading this” story is Ted Chiang’s _Story of My Life_.

It still comes across, from your description, as something in the YA “problem novel” genre, which isn’t a genre I generally seek out, having read more than enough of them to this point.

(p.s. typo in the first line, Viokence instead of Violence)

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