Ratz Are Nice

By Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite

PSP - Pure Street Punk story offering a volatile combination of skinhead cultures existing in an uneasy balance on Vancouver's meaner street. Visceral imagery combines with startling language in this challenging novel where sexuality and ethnicity blur, and neofacism and Nazism overlap with rudeboy culture and street punk, where what you see is not what is there and no one is what they seem. Disorienting, disturbing and dangerous. '...incredibly good...so original, gorgeous, propulsive and alive that it almost reinvents fiction before your eyes.' Dennis Cooper

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555835546
• ISBN13: 9781555835545
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Alyson Pubns
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.5" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Robert "Nerve" Miller

In Ratz are Nice (PSP) Braithwaite exposes a generally little known and entirely misunderstood culture existing not in London or Toronto but in Victoria, B.C. Until now best known as the land of the newly wed and nearly dead, one feels as though a rock has been overturned in the pristine rain forest; underneath, a seething, alarming and complex world draws one downward for a closer look, triggering feelings which range from dismay to utter fascination.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.

Ratz Are Nice

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.

Boys will Be Boys

"This is not a generational novel, and these boys are not typical. But their stories have very definite, if inchoate, things to say. In Braithwaite's remarkable hands, [sex] becomes the connective tissue, as often tender as it is rough, that binds the entire social world he's concerned with, transcending even the boundaries of music."

Ratz are Nice = the book of the year

Once you've got your mind around "Wigger," the previous novel by Lawrence Y. Braithwaite, you're spoiled for other books, other writers. That's how good he is. Now the new book is one I've been looking forward to for a long time, and it's finally here. Warning! The book contains some scenes of extreme violence and brutality, and it's not for everyone. That said, I don't hesitate to recommend it to everyone. Braithwaite's got a magic touch when it comes to telling a story, and gets so deeply into the minds of his tormented characters you feel you are slipping directly into their skins. Some people like to pigeonhole Braithwaite into a convenient niche: "he's a gay writer," "he's a black writer," "he's a punk writer," but on the evidence of WIGGER and RATZ ARE NICE that doesn't make much sense. Think of him instead as a grand novelist with the sweep and techincal bravura of Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Gunter Grass, the Joyce of "Dubliners," or someone like Don DeLillo. That's how good he is. Rarely have I read a modern novel with as much depth perception as RATZ ARE NICE. At first it's a bit confusing, but happily Braithwaite has provided a glossary of unfamiliar terms at the back of the book that helps to ground the reader (and all by itself it's a marvelous document, funny and ironic and touching by turns). He comes armed with madness! Get on the bandwagon, it's Braithwaite's world and we just rent space on his far corners!