The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Portable Promised Land, by Touré
reviewed by Rob Mawyer

Touré. The Portable Promised Land. Little, Brown, 2002. 256 pp. $23.95.

It takes a certain panache, and certainly some talent, to pull off a single name. Not to worry: Touré, the Rolling Stone writer and self-proclaimed tennis champ of the current literary elite, exhibits both in this new collection of short stories. His prose is aggressive and hip, his characters outrageous, and his stories, for lack of a better word, outlandish. How else to describe Huggy Bear Jackson’s tripped-out Cutlass Supreme, creeping down the street at fifteen m.p.h. and suffering from brownouts, in “Steviewondermobile”; the wicked restaurant Jamais in “The Playground of the Ecstatically Blasé,” which serves, among other delicacies, the finest rhinoceros testes you’ve ever tried; or the demise of the philandering Right Reveren [sic] Daddy Love, who serves his congregation in an abandoned three-story KFC? But the eccentricities of character and situation mask a deeper tragedy below the surface of Soul City, Touré’s fictional stand-in for New York City. Indeed, many of these stories seem preoccupied with a group of black artists and thinkers, mostly musicians, whose voices speak only in absentia. Their names are repeated over and over: Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Biggie Smalls (Christopher Wallace), Tupac Shakur. And others too: King, Basquiat, Clemente, Malcolm, Charlie Parker. Their absence, it seems, is the foundation on which the city and these stories are constructed. Touré’s Soul City, ultimately, is a metropolis of loss, whose citizens lack leaders and whose true founders have long since passed. The Portable Promised Land marks the entrance of a talented new voice in American letters, and if Touré already sees himself in the company of writers like Wallace, Franzen, Moody, and Eggers—he’s by no means on their level yet—we might forgive him his hubris. He does go by only one name, after all.