Black Cola
by Frank Laric
They say that living a good life is all about the choices you make. You can extend the thought to writing and say that writing a good novel is all about the choices the author makes. A good author knows what to emphasize and what to diminish, what to include and what to exclude, what to put in the forefront of the narrative and what to place in the background. Frank Laric, the virtually unknown author of Black Cola, does not make effective choices in the writing of this oddball novel. But then there is something about his bad decisions that make this somewhat of a uniquely interesting read.
The concept behind Black Cola is that two racist businessmen and a Nazi chemist concoct a soda, sold under the titular name, that sterilizes the people who drink it. The three conspirators market the drink to African-American people although some white people take a liking to it also. Sales are wildly successful, but when the birth rate begins to rapidly decline, people get suspicious. A criminal investigation is made, and the three businessmen end up on trial.
Amiel Gruensvig began his career as a chemist for the Third Reich during the reign of Hitler. After the war, he flees to America and finds work in a cola bottling company. Louie Duval is a Cajun businessman from Louisiana who hates African-American people because when he tried to rape a Black woman, she defended herself by slashing him with a knife. Sam Waters is a Texas businessman who meets Duval in a bar where they begin hatching a plot to ethnically cleanse the African-American population. They launch the Black Cola corporation and that is where they find Gruensvig. Then there is Velma, Sam’s wife who knows all about the conspiracy, but refuses to cooperate with the investigation until she gets called as a witness during the trial. None of these characters have any redeeming qualities.
Strangely enough, Sam Waters’ lawyer, named Bud Winthrope, is made the central character of the plot. Bud and Sam are old friends, but Bud, a married man himself, is having an affair with Sam’s wife Velma. This love triangle is used as the central theme to tie all the plot lines together. In fact, this affair is the most prominent theme in the whole book, so much so that all the other themes take a backseat to it. Considering that the story is supposed to be about an attempted genocide, it appears to be an odd choice for a central plot line. But considering that Velma becomes the key witness in the trial, it functions well at holding the whole narrative together.
Velma is also involved in subplots relating to the other three conspirators. She struggles to keep her marriage with Sam together in one thread. She also gets assaulted by Louie Duval and attempts to help Gruensvig escape to Mexico to avoid prosecution. Why she wants to help the Nazi is never clearly explained.
Otherwise, Sam and Bud are the most well-rounded characters. Sam is unapologetic about his crime and feels he is being betrayed by society for putting him in jail. He also pins his hopes of being found not guilty on laying all blame on his partners, dishonestly trying to convince the jury that he got tricked into doing something he didn’t want to do. Sam also knows that Velma and Bud are sleeping together and he gives Bud permission to carry on as he is. In fact Sam is so enthralled with the idea of Bud and Velma’s adultery that you might wonder if he has some kind of cuckold kink. All of these subplots involving Velma find their way into the courtroom proceedings.
By the end of the trial, it becomes more clear that the lawyer Bud Winthrope is the lead character. He is written about with the most detail, but in the end his motivations remain unclear. His desire to be with Velma is understandable enough, but his loyalty to Sam Waters is highly questionable. Even though he has maintained a long standing friendship with Sam, an outspoken white supremacist, he claims to be against racism and expresses no cognitive dissonance between their mutual admiration and Sam’s repugnant beliefs. To make it worse, Sam is not just a run of the mill ordinary ignoramus, but he was actively involved in a plot to commit genocide. That goes far beyond ordinary rudeness or petty crime. But Bud insists that Sam is just a great guy who made a bad mistake in life and deserves to be forgiven. It is impossible to tell who the real Bud Winthrope really is. You might draw the conclusion that he turns a blind eye to Sam’s rotten character for the sake of getting closer to Velma, making him no more than a piece of human crap. If it is the author’s intention to send that message then he could have made it more obvious because if that is the intended meaning, it is so subtle that it is almost indiscernible.
The trajectory of Bud’s life is a strange one too. Before and after the trial, all the culprits directly associated with the Black Cola company die off one by one until only Velma is left. Finally Bud gets her all to himself, but then he loses her too. He deals with all this by running into the arms of the Catholic church, finding redemption in religion. But Bud is such an unemotional character that he has no real inner struggle to complement the events of the story; he is stoic in a way that does not come off as strength of character, but rather as insufficient character development on the part of the author. All the religious preaching at the end of the book, especially at Sam Waters’ funeral, reaffirms Bud’s belief that the racists, Sam and Velma, were good people who just made some a bad mistake. These religious apologetics in the end sound more like a cop out on the author’s part. The author’s point isn’t entirely clear, but he appears to be saying that racists are people too and God loves all people so therefore we should be forgiving. That’s all fine and good, but it dodges the question of how we should deal with racists in the real world. Supposing we do get forgiven by God and go to Heaven in the end, what are we supposed to do about racists who hurt people here in the meantime? Religious salvation simply defers the problem to the afterlife. This is a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?
So considering this book is supposed to be about an African-American genocide, you might wonder how Black people figure into the narrative. Actually they do, but less you than you might be inclined to think. Charley Yates is the father of a middle-class African-American family in Atlanta. He also belongs to a militant, secretive Black Power activist group. Through them, Charley gets assigned the task of assassinating one of the Black Cola conspirators during the trial. That is Charley’s whole story. He is a two-dimensional character and his act of violence serves a narrative function by altering the defense’s strategy during the trial. Otherwise, the militants are involved in the death that happens at the end, but overall this subplot is subordinate to everything else that happens in the story. The militants are portrayed in a neutral light, being written about as neither benign nor malevolent. Still, it is strange that a book that supposedly addresses the subject of the evils of racism would place its African-American characters in such a minor role. I don’t know who Frank Laric is, but I’m quite convinced he is white.
As an author Frank Laric does not always make the best choices. This novel gives the appearance of addressing racial injustice and yet the core story is about an adulterous relationship and how it plays out in a soap opera courtroom drama. Even worse, the story is primarily about white people, most of which are unapologetic, or at best passe, about their bigotry. The theme of racism is only superficially addressed in some dialogue, testimony during the trial, a funeral eulogy, and the big kumbaya fest at the end. The theme of racism is like an afterthought used as a cloak to dress up an otherwise mediocre story about a love affair between two married people. However, if there is anything admirable about this novel it is the tightly wound plot structure. All the subplots and narrative twists feed directly into the progression of the trial. At a technical level, this is well written. It really just suffers terribly because the author has his thematic priorities all out of order.
Black Cola is not a great novel by any standards that can be thought of. What makes it most interesting is the way in which it inverts common sense logic about what to place in the foreground and background in its structure, making it a slightly challenging read even if it is ultimately a failed work of art. And despite the way in which it leaves no loose threads or plot holes in the end, it can stick in your mind simply because it isn’t obvious what the author intends to say. The meaning of the book is not entirely clear. Black Cola is a very rare paperback so if you happen to come across a copy, it would be worth picking up for its value as a collectible vintage book. It might even be worth reading once just because it is such an oddity, but you probably wouldn’t want to read it a second time.
The concept behind Black Cola is that two racist businessmen and a Nazi chemist concoct a soda, sold under the titular name, that sterilizes the people who drink it. The three conspirators market the drink to African-American people although some white people take a liking to it also. Sales are wildly successful, but when the birth rate begins to rapidly decline, people get suspicious. A criminal investigation is made, and the three businessmen end up on trial.
Amiel Gruensvig began his career as a chemist for the Third Reich during the reign of Hitler. After the war, he flees to America and finds work in a cola bottling company. Louie Duval is a Cajun businessman from Louisiana who hates African-American people because when he tried to rape a Black woman, she defended herself by slashing him with a knife. Sam Waters is a Texas businessman who meets Duval in a bar where they begin hatching a plot to ethnically cleanse the African-American population. They launch the Black Cola corporation and that is where they find Gruensvig. Then there is Velma, Sam’s wife who knows all about the conspiracy, but refuses to cooperate with the investigation until she gets called as a witness during the trial. None of these characters have any redeeming qualities.
Strangely enough, Sam Waters’ lawyer, named Bud Winthrope, is made the central character of the plot. Bud and Sam are old friends, but Bud, a married man himself, is having an affair with Sam’s wife Velma. This love triangle is used as the central theme to tie all the plot lines together. In fact, this affair is the most prominent theme in the whole book, so much so that all the other themes take a backseat to it. Considering that the story is supposed to be about an attempted genocide, it appears to be an odd choice for a central plot line. But considering that Velma becomes the key witness in the trial, it functions well at holding the whole narrative together.
Velma is also involved in subplots relating to the other three conspirators. She struggles to keep her marriage with Sam together in one thread. She also gets assaulted by Louie Duval and attempts to help Gruensvig escape to Mexico to avoid prosecution. Why she wants to help the Nazi is never clearly explained.
Otherwise, Sam and Bud are the most well-rounded characters. Sam is unapologetic about his crime and feels he is being betrayed by society for putting him in jail. He also pins his hopes of being found not guilty on laying all blame on his partners, dishonestly trying to convince the jury that he got tricked into doing something he didn’t want to do. Sam also knows that Velma and Bud are sleeping together and he gives Bud permission to carry on as he is. In fact Sam is so enthralled with the idea of Bud and Velma’s adultery that you might wonder if he has some kind of cuckold kink. All of these subplots involving Velma find their way into the courtroom proceedings.
By the end of the trial, it becomes more clear that the lawyer Bud Winthrope is the lead character. He is written about with the most detail, but in the end his motivations remain unclear. His desire to be with Velma is understandable enough, but his loyalty to Sam Waters is highly questionable. Even though he has maintained a long standing friendship with Sam, an outspoken white supremacist, he claims to be against racism and expresses no cognitive dissonance between their mutual admiration and Sam’s repugnant beliefs. To make it worse, Sam is not just a run of the mill ordinary ignoramus, but he was actively involved in a plot to commit genocide. That goes far beyond ordinary rudeness or petty crime. But Bud insists that Sam is just a great guy who made a bad mistake in life and deserves to be forgiven. It is impossible to tell who the real Bud Winthrope really is. You might draw the conclusion that he turns a blind eye to Sam’s rotten character for the sake of getting closer to Velma, making him no more than a piece of human crap. If it is the author’s intention to send that message then he could have made it more obvious because if that is the intended meaning, it is so subtle that it is almost indiscernible.
The trajectory of Bud’s life is a strange one too. Before and after the trial, all the culprits directly associated with the Black Cola company die off one by one until only Velma is left. Finally Bud gets her all to himself, but then he loses her too. He deals with all this by running into the arms of the Catholic church, finding redemption in religion. But Bud is such an unemotional character that he has no real inner struggle to complement the events of the story; he is stoic in a way that does not come off as strength of character, but rather as insufficient character development on the part of the author. All the religious preaching at the end of the book, especially at Sam Waters’ funeral, reaffirms Bud’s belief that the racists, Sam and Velma, were good people who just made some a bad mistake. These religious apologetics in the end sound more like a cop out on the author’s part. The author’s point isn’t entirely clear, but he appears to be saying that racists are people too and God loves all people so therefore we should be forgiving. That’s all fine and good, but it dodges the question of how we should deal with racists in the real world. Supposing we do get forgiven by God and go to Heaven in the end, what are we supposed to do about racists who hurt people here in the meantime? Religious salvation simply defers the problem to the afterlife. This is a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?
So considering this book is supposed to be about an African-American genocide, you might wonder how Black people figure into the narrative. Actually they do, but less you than you might be inclined to think. Charley Yates is the father of a middle-class African-American family in Atlanta. He also belongs to a militant, secretive Black Power activist group. Through them, Charley gets assigned the task of assassinating one of the Black Cola conspirators during the trial. That is Charley’s whole story. He is a two-dimensional character and his act of violence serves a narrative function by altering the defense’s strategy during the trial. Otherwise, the militants are involved in the death that happens at the end, but overall this subplot is subordinate to everything else that happens in the story. The militants are portrayed in a neutral light, being written about as neither benign nor malevolent. Still, it is strange that a book that supposedly addresses the subject of the evils of racism would place its African-American characters in such a minor role. I don’t know who Frank Laric is, but I’m quite convinced he is white.
As an author Frank Laric does not always make the best choices. This novel gives the appearance of addressing racial injustice and yet the core story is about an adulterous relationship and how it plays out in a soap opera courtroom drama. Even worse, the story is primarily about white people, most of which are unapologetic, or at best passe, about their bigotry. The theme of racism is only superficially addressed in some dialogue, testimony during the trial, a funeral eulogy, and the big kumbaya fest at the end. The theme of racism is like an afterthought used as a cloak to dress up an otherwise mediocre story about a love affair between two married people. However, if there is anything admirable about this novel it is the tightly wound plot structure. All the subplots and narrative twists feed directly into the progression of the trial. At a technical level, this is well written. It really just suffers terribly because the author has his thematic priorities all out of order.
Black Cola is not a great novel by any standards that can be thought of. What makes it most interesting is the way in which it inverts common sense logic about what to place in the foreground and background in its structure, making it a slightly challenging read even if it is ultimately a failed work of art. And despite the way in which it leaves no loose threads or plot holes in the end, it can stick in your mind simply because it isn’t obvious what the author intends to say. The meaning of the book is not entirely clear. Black Cola is a very rare paperback so if you happen to come across a copy, it would be worth picking up for its value as a collectible vintage book. It might even be worth reading once just because it is such an oddity, but you probably wouldn’t want to read it a second time.
No comments:
Post a Comment