Shock and awe

Black Flies is a classic war
story, without a war

by JULIET WATERS

There was, of course, a time in New York when the following rant had no irony: “Fuck 911, Fuck Giuliani, 911’s a joke.” Set in Harlem, circa 1996, Shannon Burke’s second novel, Black Flies, draws from his own experiences working as a New York City paramedic. But if the place and time evoke a feeling of nostalgia, clamp down hard on that emotion.

This is no memoir. It’s a classic war story, as horrifying as anything that’s coming back right now from Baghdad. The main difference is that it’s set in a war that’s been going on for what feels like forever: the war on America’s urban poor. It’s a war that isn’t acknowledged as a war, even though the troops being sent in are clearly suffering from all the obvious symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s not being fought with bombs; just loose gun control and extreme neglect.

Gunshot wounds aside, if you think neglect alone isn’t gory, here’s a description from just the first page: “…blue-gray intestines on a red steering wheel, dead mouths filled with live cockroaches, an overweight diabetic woman’s soiled sock with a few black toes inside it falling out and rolling about on the floor like oblong marbles wobbling to a halt beneath the television….”

It gets worse, much worse, in a novel that creates minimalist art with maximalist reality. The miracle of Black Flies is how it distinguishes itself so clearly from the gore porn we’ve been watching for the last decade on shows like E.R. and CSI. With Grey’s Anatomy, America has even turned graphic medical suffering into romantic comedy.

The experience of watching those shows compared with reading Burke’s novel is basically the difference between lying on a gurney numbly and dreamily watching the action vs. having somebody applying paddles to get your heart beating again. There is shock that kills people’s spirit, and there is shock that saves it. Though Black Flies shows how relentless shock can destroy the human psyche, the novel as a whole falls clearly into the second category.

The story is straightforward. An aspiring medical student, Ollie Cross, from a Chicago suburb, becomes a medic in NYC because he thinks it will give him valuable experience and look good on his re-application (he failed to get into Stony Brook the first time). His girlfriend was more successful and believes that his lack of self-confidence came through in his med school interview. Going into this job, suffering from a garden-variety blow to his self-esteem, Cross is the perfect victim for the more cynical paramedics who thrive on breaking in the rookies.

Cross has intelligence and compassion, but lacks two essential survival skills, self-esteem and urban experience. It’s logical that Cross would feel the urge to prove himself to a couple of veteran medics who redefine the word asshole, and, frankly, even the word sadist. But there’s more to those characters than meets the eye.

Compassion is not a useful skill for medics who have to make split decisions between tending to a terrified kid with a gunshot wound in the foot, and the less obviously vulnerable, but seriously wounded. It’s Burke’s astonishing handle on the subtleties of the job and the characters of the people who work it that makes Black Flies so much more than a docu-drama. It’s an existential thriller that is to urban noir what black holes are to space.

Burke illustrates in ways that are unspeakable in a short review how Cross’s normal urge to prove himself as a man propels him so quickly, and so disastrously, towards urges that we would like to think are inhuman, but unfortunately aren’t. And then, just when you think there’s little hope, Burke shows how normal heroism can also be.

Black Flies by Shannon Burke,
Soft Skull Press, pb, 186pp, $15.95