At the End of Lonely Street

...This is one of the novel's few quiet moments, a self-indulgent act of love and desire that speaks perfectly to Elvis' hopeless plight...

...Elvis has entered the building, he thought, as he admired himself...

...They stand out vividly for a moment, as Elvis does while donning his costume, then recede again behind a didactic voice determined to explicate and assign meaning where it is already obvious...

...Elvis' escape to Lagos does not improve his lot...

...Some, like the King of Beggars, narrowly trump their cartoonish introductions—"gnarled claws" "toothless grin" and sole eye "glittering insanely...

...The irony, of course, is intended to point to what has been lost, but the device all too often renders that loss a cold abstraction...

...Before her departure, Beatrice's character is hemmed in by the narrative's self-conscious anguish, and by Abani's insistence that we note the muted bravery ofherpassing away...

...Beatrice's death signifies grief without summoning the emotion in her son, or in us...

...For all the technical dexterity he demonstrates in observing the tedious yet essential details of life, though, he rarely provides more than a surface view of his characters...

...As an urban landscape Lagos strains the imagination: It is frenzied, poverty ridden, yet suffused with the throbbing pulse of a population struggling for its daily survival...

...The last chapters of GraceLand are spent in torture chambers drawn no doubt from Abani's own life...

...Reviewed by Dinaw Mengestu Contributor, New York "Sun" WITH THE largest population of any African nation and one of the world's major oil reserves, Nigeria once seemed set to become the economic and political pride of postcolonial Africa...

...Maroko has been demolished by the government, his father is dead, and Elvis' fate is left in the hands of a young girl, aptly named Blessing...

...He will never become a famous dancer any more than he will become Elvis Presley, but his compulsion to imagine another life is an essential element of his survival...

...Abani is a skillful descriptive writer, and GraceLand often succeeds in its recording of violence...

...From those experiences have come two collections of poetry, and now Abani's first novel since his flight 14 years ago...

...We see Nigeria through Elvis' eyes as the narrative oscillates back and forth between his early childhood in rural Afikpo and his life as a teenager in the slums ofLagos...

...His father has taken a new lover, named Comfort, who verbally abuses the boy and is short on motherly care...

...his father, Sunday, sinks into a permanent drunken despair...

...They traced a jagged pattern down her face and robes to collect in a pool of spent shell casings at her feet...

...The sweet smell of marijuana floated past them, mixing with the smell of stale sex, warm blood, burned wood and flesh, rising in an incense offering to God...

...In one of GraceLand's best realized scenes, Elvis goes into his bedroom and puts on "Heartbreak Hotel...

...Grace Land's protagonist is Elvis Osake, a young Presley impersonator...

...He comes most alive in the privacy of his own imagination, unencumbered by the troubling questions and condemnations that Abani has beset him with...

...A cruel indifference to human life breeds the collective resignation of a people who know all too well how capricious the difference between living and dying can be...

...and Elvis' uncle rapes both his cousin and him...

...Most, however, fail to register beyond the level of irony coded in their names...

...The smell of garbage from refuse dumps, unflushed toilets and stale bodies" fills Maroko, the slum they live in...

...He gathers together the details of a scene with a keen visual clarity and distills them into a haunting image, as when Elvis enters the ruins of a burned out church strewn with the remains of its slaughtered congregation during the Biafran War: "The alabaster Madonna wept bullet holes...

...Overwhelmed rather than stirred by the many horrors jammed into the Afikpo passages, we remain uncomfortably disengaged...

...Abani's fastidiously unsentimental eye notes the broken bodies and spirits of an entire community...

...In the nine years that separate those events, Elvis' mother, Beatrice, dies of cancer...

...His name symbolizes the erosion of an indigenous culture...

...His teenage writings—two novels and several plays—put him on the wrong side of the law...

...Her presence clings to the rest of the book only because the pages of her journal—filled with recipes and descriptions of plants that she will need in the afterlife—are used to separate the chapters...

...Sixteen and unemployed, he is a high school dropout who reads Rainer Maria Rilke and Ralph Ellison...

...Arrested three times over the 24 years he lived in Nigeria, Abani was beaten, tortured and eventually given a death sentence he narrowly escaped...

...Lagos' streets are littered with corpses from hitand-run accidents, men are publicly torched for stealing, and government soldiers exercise their vicious power at will...

...Its history has been one of generals (Yakubu Gowon, Muhammadu Buhari, Sani Abache) and inevitably of violence— beginning with the mass murders during the war against secessionist Biafra in the late '60s and continuing with the widescale human rights abuses that until recently were a hallmark of every Nigerian government...

...The Afikpo passages take us from a farcical tribal initiationrite to a failed political campaign that forces him and his debt-ridden father to flee to the city...

...Against this chaotic background Elvis meets his friend Redemption, who drags him from a life of casual Elvis impersonations on the beach into an underworld of prostitution, drugs, and traffic in human body parts...

...What you learn about Nigeria will make you want to weep...

...Instead, since gaining independence in 1960, it has endured seven military coups, a civil war, and countless ethnic clashes that have left thousands of innocent civilians dead...

...Bom in 1966, author Chris Abani has had a painful and sadly emblematic relationship with his native country...

...Sunday is only as sacred as the jugs of palm wine he swills, and Innocent, after his years in the Biafran War, is anything but...

...He takes out the makeup kit that he uses to dress up as an Elvis impersonator and slowly transforms himself from black to white: "He walked back to the table and pulled the wig on, bending to look in the mirror...

...Elvis meets the King of Beggars, too, a haggard, sagacious tramp and dance troupe leader who later dies a political martyr...

...Despite its serious flaws, GraceLand draws a searing picture of a country devouring its own children...

...Redemption does fulfill the promise of his name, but first he drags Elvis through the seediest pits of Lagos...

...After being beaten to the verge of death, Elvis is dumped back into the world where what little he had is completely gone...

...The misfortunes of his boyhood occur in such quick succession that each tragedy comes to seem like just one more unhappy reality...

...Blessed with the lingering naivete of his youth, Elvis stands heartbroken and frustrated, at once complicit in his own mistakes and outraged at the world around him...