All the Jazz
At one point the narrator is in court and he describes a woman sitting in the front as being one of those people who compares everything to jazz; well, almost everything:
“Childbirth is like jazz. Muhammad Ali is like jazz. Philadelphia is like jazz. Jazz is like jazz. Everything is like jazz except for me. To her I’m like a remixed Anglo-Saxon appropriation of black music. I’m Pat Boone in blackface singing a watered-down version of Fats Domino’s `Ain’t That a Shame.’”
California Dreaming
The setting of the novel is a fictional community in California called Dickens. The narrator provides a pretty succinct characterization through metaphor. One hopes it is merely figurative language, anyway:
“Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian community.”
"Too Many Mexicans"
The narrator describes the racism constructed upon racism constructed upon apathy in delineating black disregard for immigrant workers:
“`Too many Mexicans’ is an oral rationalization to remain stuck in our ways.”
Dickens, Part II
The fictional Dickens is also described with a much more poetic metaphor when the author uses the very real Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County to figure out an important thing about his home:
“205 Bernard Avenue sat on a nameless peach-colored section of gridiron streets bordered by freeways on each side. I wanted to cry. It hurt knowing that Dickens had been exiled to the netherworld of invisible L.A. communities.”
2015: Simile of the Year
The narrator does pretty good selling square watermelons which he knows are actually quite easy to grow, but never fail to produce a stunned reaction. The simile he chooses for the point of comparison is absolutely sublime.
“And like that black president, you’d think that after two terms of looking at a dude in a suit deliver the State of the Union address, you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do.”
