A Review of James Han Mattson’s The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A, 2017).

[stephenhongsohn]

 

A Review of James Han Mattson’s The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A, 2017).

I was really excited to review this title, the debut of James Han Mattson, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A, 2017). Target.com gives us this editorial description here: “A heartbroken and humiliated Ricky Graves took the life of a classmate and himself. Five months later, the sleepy community is still in shock and mourning. Ricky’s sister, Alyssa, returns to confront her shattered, withdrawn mother and her guilt over the brother she left adrift. Mark McVitry, the lone survivor of the deadly outburst sparked by his own cruelty, is tormented by visions of Ricky’s vengeful spirit. Ricky’s surrogate older brother, Corky Meeks, grapples with doubts about the fragile boy he tried to protect but may have doomed instead. And Jeremy Little, who inadvertently became Ricky’s long-distance Internet crush despite never having met, seeks to atone for failing to hear his friend’s cries for help. For those closest to the tormented killer, shock and grief have given way to soul searching, as they’re forced to confront their broken dreams, buried desires, and missed opportunities. And in their shared search for meaning and redemption, Ricky’s loved ones find a common purpose: learning to trust their feelings, fighting for real intimacy in a world grown selfish and insincere, and fearlessly embracing all that matters most…before it’s gone from their lives.” The overview gives us only an anemic understanding of the novel’s complicated formal registers. It is told in shifting first person narration: we get turns from Ricky’s sister Alyssa; Ricky’s Man-Date chatting buddy, Jeremy Little; and Ricky’s high school classmates, Claire Chang and Mark McVitry. Narrative discourse is further enriched as Mattson chooses to include verbatim transcripts between Ricky and Jeremy that record what occurred during their Man-Date chats. Further still, Mattson embeds e-mail correspondences between Ricky’s mother and her favorite self-help author, Victoria Gorham. I was actually listening to an interview between Mattson and NPR when I was writing this novel, and I didn’t realize it was actually inspired by the Tyler Clementi incident. This origin point makes a lot of sense because the novel is very much about the fallout that stems from a prank that exposes Ricky’s desperation: he wishes to be recognized as a desiring and desirous queer subject. Mattson’s talents are especially on display when articulating the various ways that Ricky is denied a full subjectivity: not only by society, but by the local small-town culture in which he is enmeshed. Jeremy’s presence becomes only a temporary salve, something that you already know will fail to quell the rising sense of futility that Ricky feels. The novel manages to make perfect sense out of why a teenager like Ricky would commit such a violent act, but at the same time, you can’t help but feeling a little bit depressed by it all. On another level, as soon as I knew that the author identified as queer, I was hoping that we might actually get some queer Asian North American characters in the fictional world. Though Claire Chang is definitely Asian, she’s not written as queer (at least from the general frame of same-sex desire). I am often so hungry for these depictions because they tend to be few and far between, but nevertheless, the novel does an impressive job of rounding out Ricky’s life, even if we don’t get a section from his narrative perspective. Claire’s so-called Asian-ness stands out not only because she’s aware of her social difference, but also because of the small-town ethos that marks so much of the novel as white. Indeed, characters rarely mention anything related to ethnic difference precisely because they don’t have to, a fact that Claire understands all too keenly. In this sense, we can’t be surprised when she is one of the few characters that tries to find a way to get justice for Ricky, even though it could be argued that his act of homicide catastrophically negated any demands he might have retained for adjudication (and sympathy). In this way, her character is one of the more memorable ones, and I found myself returning to her narrative with much alacrity, over and above, say Jeremy Little, who I found to be a character too-filled with privilege, even as he is aware of that status.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Prayers-Ricky-Graves-Novel/dp/1503942473

 

https://www.target.com/p/lost-prayers-of-ricky-graves-hardcover-james-han-mattson/-/A-52914357