Mother/Daughter Complex

One cold day, I was riding the number six bus past Lakewood Cemetery when I saw two street punks trying to take shelter from the blustery rain. They were the kind of pierced and combat-boot-wearing kids you sometimes see on street corners holding a cardboard sign that reads Homeless, please help. They looked ragged, underdressed, and dirty as they huddled together, but they were grinning in a way that put me in mind of a pack of wolves—part feral, part tender.

We don’t tend to think of the Twin Cities as a gathering place for teenage runaways. Nevertheless, Joshua Furst’s new novel, The Sabotage Café (Alfred K. Knopf, $23.95), offers an uncomfortable look at the mysterious and dangerous subculture of homeless teens in Minneapolis—as well as insight into how little this subculture has changed over the years.

The narrator, Julia, we learn through flashbacks, spent the eighties reeling through the acid-soaked, heroin-tipped, sex-for-drugs counterculture of the University of Minnesota’s Dinkytown. Already damaged by the violent death of an older sister, Sarah, Julia experiences a nameless trauma that hangs over the rest of the narrative and defines Julia’s world as a place of terror. Despite a diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder, Julia marries a lawyer, moves to Plymouth, and manages, for a time, to present a façade of normal domesticity for her daughter, Cheryl. When Cheryl is fifteen, Julia becomes psychologically unhinged and is hospitalized. Cheryl, terrified by her mother’s sudden and rapid relapse into delusion and paranoia, runs away from home to retrace her mother’s steps in the Dinkytown of today.

Furst has a fine ear for the gutter-punk speech that is the lingua franca of Dinkytown’s homeless and disaffected teen population. He’s familiar with words such as spanging, which means begging for spare charge, and Betty, a word coined by surfers to mean any girl. He also gets the patterns of speech right, as well as the self-righteousness, especially with the character of Trent, Cheryl’s boyfriend: “It’s about ownership,” he explained. “You can let them f---ing own you, you can shop at the places they want you to shop and believe the f---ing things they want you to believe, help them build their f---ing empire, all that bulls--t, be a f---ing drone like f---ing everyone else, or you can, you know, f---ing fight the power. It’s like that Clash song, you know?” Trent doesn’t shop where “they” want him to, he shoplifts there, and he woos Cheryl with a stolen peacoat.

As the narrative unfolds, the reader learns of Cheryl’s experiences in the street-punk subculture through Julia, who is able (or believes she is able) to experience everything Cheryl does through a psychic bond that connects her to both her dead sister and Cheryl. She witnesses Cheryl’s initiation into the clan of kids squatting at the abandoned Sabotage Café, with their violent pleasures and anarchist posturing, and describes it all in gritty, unflinching detail.

After a while, however, one begins to wonder whether Julia can really observe her daughter clairvoyantly or if she is just crazy. Julia is lucid and nutsy by turns, which makes it difficult to figure out if things are actually happening to Cheryl or if it’s all a creation of Julia’s febrile imagination. Or, is the narrative between mother and daughter so inextricably entwined that it can’t be separated into separate voices and experiences? Ultimately, the reader is left to decide.

Sarah, Julia’s dead sister, also floats through the story, reminding Julia of the dangers of openness in a vicious world. The only words she speaks are directed toward Julia as a child: “You know,” she’d say, “everyone has different gifts. Some people are good at doing math, some are good at playing softball. But you, Julia, you’re good at turning the world upside down and showing us all a new way of seeing it.”

Does Julia succeed, through her upside-down narrative, in showing us all a new way to see the world? Can we stand to look at what she reveals? These are the questions Furst’s book ultimately asks. He only provides some of the answers, leaving the reader to come to their own conclusions—one of which may be that life at home isn’t so bad after all.

Lucy Vilankulu is a freelance writer. She lives in Linden Hills, lapped in middle-class guilt.