Jack's Acts

Jack Womack, whose fifth novel, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, arrives from the Atlantic Monthly Press this month, is a drive-by futurist cruising those streets down which we all wish we could lose America's worst bad dreams. His aim is utterly merciless, and the central strength of his arsenal is an ability to fracture the language of the late 20th century into vicious shards that wound us in unexpected ways.

One of those dangerous southern literary men (Lexington, Kentucky) capable of hunkering down and flatout appreciating Manhattan in ways usually undreamed of by the general populace, Womack knows his way around the compost of violence and death impacting the roots of his chosen city. He knows that we are always just a few clicks off the frequency of terror. Random Acts gives voice to this knowledge in the diary entries of Lola Hart, aged 12. Her downwardly mobile parents spiral, along with the rest of their ill-fated cohort, toward a catastrophic singularity compounded of massive unemployment, inflation, bad government, and violent civil unrest. Lola, a kind and intelligent child, counts the score as best she can, but we watch, chilled and fascinated, as primordial forces combine to make her a small but furious element in a streetscape where sociopathy looks like a basic survival characteristic.

That Womack makes this transformation heartbreaking ly credible is testimony to both the seriousness of his intent and the skill of his attack. The novel's closing pages, in which Lola casts off her beloved diary, are intoned in a lyrically murderous American Newspeak as sharply tragic as anything our language has recently produced. New York City Orwell for 1994.

WILLIAM GIBSON