Tweakerville edition by Alexei Melnick Literature Fiction eBooks
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Deep Into Drugs In Hawai‘i
At the drug house the party is going full blast. Snort it, rail it, rock it, poke it, chong it, launch bowls, bang lines, take whacks, smoke it out of glass...
It feels like the whole yard could ignite, jump off and blow up into action any minute under the drunken moonlight.
For Jesse Gomes, this is the best night of his life.
Jess is 17, eighty-sixed from his honest working-class Hawai‘i family home, living with the dealer and his crew, running drugs on his moped, useful because he is still legally a juvenille.
Wasted and crashed out, he drops off to sleep—and wakes up with a strange girl lying next to him, dead, ODd on crystal methamphetamine, ice.
Call the ambulance? No way. That would bring the cops, and the house is loaded with drugs. Gotta get rid of the body. Jesse digs the grave, deep, part of him knowing it's his own grave he's digging.
And he keeps getting pulled deeper into the nightmare universe of Tweakerville, the world of tweakers, chronics, bulls and hammers, tattooed gangstas who swing machete and pull trigger.
In a crazed and violent world outside the law, Jesse wants to believe in some kind of code of honor. Banished from his own family, he needs human connection.
But ice is savage—it can only twist loyalty into treachery and betrayal. Ice rules life, and ice can decree death.
This is the story that Jesse is compelled to tell, and Tweakerville is compulsive reading, appalling and enthralling from killer opening to killer ending.
Tweakerville edition by Alexei Melnick Literature Fiction eBooks
Terrible! This book is absurd, what a pathetic composition about drugs and the low life in HI...Product details
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Tweakerville edition by Alexei Melnick Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Down into Hawaii's drug culture. There's more to the Aloha State than grass skirts and coconuts, there's a deep divide between what you see on postcards and the day to day reality of those struggling through sixty hour work weeks to get by. Jesse is determined not to kowtow like so many others so he enters the drug game to escape the system. But dealing is more than bling, respect, and partying; it's running with the wolves there are threats within your own pack, other packs, hunters, and limited resources/turf you will have to scrape and claw to obtain then defend.
You like see? Read da book.
I have gone through the entire space of contemporary Hawaii underbelly or "Beyond Paradise" type of literature, including great stuff by Ian MacMillan, Chris McKinney, Roland Pacheco and many others. Conclusion 'Tweakerville' is the best of them all. Peerless. Exciting, informative, gripping, spellbinding, immersive in every way. If you want to understand the beyond paradise type of scene without combing through every thing as I did, this book is your one-stop-shop. I hope to see a lot more from this great author.
Tweakerville is that rare novel that opened up a world completely unlike my own and yet allowed me to relate to characters who are guided by a seemingly alien logic. The people we get to know in Tweakerville make really bad decisions and suffer tragic consequences, and yet they're motivated by familiar things like love, loyalty, hope and frustration. The story centers on a young Hawaiian man enmeshed in the shadowy drug culture, and his struggles with addiction, violence, joblessness, estrangement from his family, and all the temptations and drama of the drug world. Opportunities for a better and wholesome life come his way, but the drug world pulls at him like a Hawaiian rip tide.
It's hard to believe this is the author's first novel. The book is a great read and I literally couldn't put it down. It starts with a tragic incident and inexorably progresses to its symmetrical conclusion through several scenes packed with action, hope, triumph, and heartbreak. A really nice touch is that it's told in the Hawaiian creole, which gave me a better sense of the place and the people.
I highly recommend this entertaining and enlightening novel.
TWEAKERVILLE Life and Death in Hawaii’s Ice World, by Alexei Melnick. 262 pages. Mutual paperback, $15.95
It is uncommon for a didactic novel to also be a good novel, but Alexei Melnick has done it with “Tweakerville,” which can be read from several points of view and works in all of them.
We know it is didactic because Melnick ends the book with a Q & A about why he wrote it and how the characters can be critiqued and understood. I generally avoid didactic novels and also novels set in Hawaii with drugs as the theme. In the first case, I hate sermons; and in the second, the plots and authors are usually lame and lazy.
I read this one because of a positive blurb by Chris McKinney, who wrote a fine novel about Hawaii’s underclass, “The Tattoo.”
“Tweakerville” can be read as a tragedy in the sense that Aristotle defined it a character makes a decision that is blameless in itself but brings disaster to everyone around him.
In this case, Jesse, a runner for a crystal meth dealer, answers a ringing cell phone. It is an automatic, thoughtless gesture; but the phone belonged to a young girl who overdosed at a party the night before. Jesse has just dug a hole to dispose of her body.
(One of the many threads of contrast in the novel is the honest dealer vs. the dishonest dealer. Apparently the dead girl had bought low-quality ice (batu, clear) from the dishonest dealer. However, honest dealers like Jesse and his mentor Robby don’t do any better than the bad ones.)
Or “Tweakerville” can be read as a noir crime novel. Jesse is the young acolyte -- 17 when we meet him -- aiming to gain respect and money by serving an established hoodlum.
In this reading, the novel is as pitiless and violent as, say, Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn.”
The best reading is as a coming of age novel. If “Tweakerville” has a long life among readers, I suspect it will be as a young adult novel, although it was not written as one. Its profanity would have precluded its publication even for adults two generations ago, but young adults read sterner stuff these days.
In addition to Jesse’s quest for adulthood, there is a love story, with Kapika, also 17 when we meet her. She is from a somewhat more privileged social class than Jesse (but only somewhat), but this is no Gatsby yearning for Daisy romance. Jesse and Kapika are among the more cynical young romantics of literature.
(I have little to criticize in this book, but for a novel meant to be realistic, there is a serious goof in the meeting scene of Jesse and Kapika. Jesse is trying to buy beer [unusually for him; he usually boosts it] and Kapika the clerk demands identification. The problem is that in Hawaii, the seller as well as the buyer has to be of age; 17-year-old Kapika would not be allowed to sell beer.)
Many betrayals and murders later, the novel ends back at the dead girl’s grave. Going clean, as dealer Robby does, does not preserve you. Being a loving family guy, like Vili, Jesse’s most admired friend, does not preserve you. Being a stand-up guy, as Jesse is, does not preserve you.
Smokable meth -- or as Jesse calls it, clear -- dominates all. “Next thing you know had seven cop cars up the road. All for one tweaked out love sick butchie. Clear is like that for some guys. No fear or pain, no tomorrow, just love and rage right now.”
Melnick has chosen to write the novel in the first person. Jesse speaks what I call Bamboo Ridge creole (because it originated in the literary magazine Bamboo Ridge), a printed form of pidgen that is not like any pidgen you hear but is serviceable enough. Kapika’s language is slightly less pidgen-y, and her tone is also slightly less effective.
Melnick is a born-and-raised, and his local color touches are authentic and nuanced, which is something outsiders writing fiction set in Hawaii never achieve. Locals will understand why Jesse’s last name is Gomes Potagees (Portuguese) are stereotyped in the islands as loquacious, but the stereotype is valid often enough; only a Potagee would have told this long story. The other locals are, typically, economical of speech.
Once or twice, Melnick oversells the contrasts. Jesse is a dropout; he has an older sister who did well in school. That her school was Punahou (Barack Obama’s high school) is not impossible for a Potagee family headed by a tugboat captain but slightly surprising.
Rent "Spun" on line for free. Save your time and money on this poorly written piece of garbage. (ps I live in Hawaii so it wasn't the pidgen that bothered me.)
Awesome book! Love the author's writing style & I'm from hawaii so the book seems like a real life. I love when I can relate to a book&its written local style with pidgin&slang. Love local island books!
being a long time transplanted 'mainlander' I appreciated the pidgin narrative and identified with the destructiveness of drug abuse in our community as well as the lack of education and parental guidance in its causation.
Terrible! This book is absurd, what a pathetic composition about drugs and the low life in HI...
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