VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)
By:
August 8, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | JACK WOMACK | 1993
Before The Hunger Games, before Divergent, before every plucky heroine rising from a dystopian hellscape, there was Lola Hart, who we meet as she begins the fresh clean pages of her new diary. “Your name is Anne,” Lola writes, “that’s a good name for a diary” (in a callback to our most iconic young diarist and her “Kitty”), and we know early on that things for Lola, like for that Anne, aren’t going to end particularly well.
Lola and her family live in the early era of the decline of America, which Womack traces through his Dryco series (Ambient, Heathen, Terraplane, Elvissey, and Going, Going, Gone), though that world isn’t invoked directly in the novel. As the world decays around them, it’s the details that spell out where we’re going: Lola’s aunt gives money to the Tombs of the Unborn Babies Foundation, and buys Lola’s sister a My Li’l Fetus doll to strap around her belly. But we aren’t in Handmaid’s Tale territory yet — instead it’s a crisis of capitalism that takes center stage, with a new economic order, rapid-fire presidential assassinations, and a constant undercurrent of riots in the streets. Reading this in the early 1990s felt speculative; reading it in 2024 feels somewhat uncanny.
What sets Random Acts apart from all of the dystopian YA that would follow over the next three decades is the formal structure of the work and Womack’s deft linguistic explorations. Everything in Lola’s life starts to unravel: her parents lose their knowledge-worker jobs and the family loses their home, Lola and her sister are increasingly out of place at their Upper East Side prep school. As Lola recounts these changes and explores new friendships built on entirely new sorts of connections, she begins a Clockwork-Orange-esque code-switching that leans hard into the urgency and brutality of survival, but not without tenderness and humor.
Womack gives us the sudden raw feelings of early adolescence, newfound queer joy amidst the rubble of abandoned buildings, and the terror of taking up the necessary violence of petty thievery and self-defense. We read along (“Oh Anne that hearthappies me nobody else hears when I word except you problem is you don’t talk back”), knowing we are building to something catastrophic and unavoidable. For a young reader in the early ’90s, this was shocking and unforgettable; in 2024, with Lolas all around us, it still is.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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