Picture a crime novel. Perhaps you are imagining “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” or an Agatha Christie book. Maybe you’re more into contemporary crime and are thinking of “The Lovely Bones” or “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Now, cast those stories aside, and make room on your bookshelf for “Blacktop Wasteland,” an illuminating dive into the criminal underworld. Written by S.A. Cosby, this new piece is a novel about crime in which getting caught is the least of the protagonist’s problems. It was one of the New York Times’ most anticipated titles of July, and deservedly so.
“Blacktop Wasteland” centers around devoted husband and loving father Beauregard “Bug” Montage. In the book’s first scene, Bug stares down a number of stressful problems, giving way to their introduction to the audience. He is competing in a road-race that, if won, could take care of a few short term problems of Bug’s: Overdue rent on his auto-body shop, one of his sons needing glasses, the other son needing braces. But, as the front flap’s description foreshadows, “Bug is at his best when the scent of gasoline mixes with the smell of fear.” It’s a high-stakes beginning to a book that’ll have you holding your breath.
“Bug” and his family live in rural Virginia, and Cosby’s vividly illustrated setting transports the reader to this different world. Cosby employs literary tools to achieve this, not by using the words on the page to depict sprawling landscapes or glowing sensory details, but through his penmanship of debilitating poverty and violent racism. Bug has a history of being an accessory to various crimes, primarily as a driver. He has been out of the world of crime for a short while, but his family is confronted with financial difficulties, and he is forced to regress. The descriptions of this behavior are not for the faint of heart. At one point, for instance, Bug uses a crescent wrench to beat the living daylights out of a rival driver, and Cosby writes how “Beauregard thought he could hear the soft clicking,” of the broken rival’s “shattered clavicle bones rubbing together.”
The book is especially poignant given the backdrop of our country’s ongoing reckoning with racism. Take, for instance, the issue of representation. Everywhere, high schoolers read countless “classics” by white authors with each coming year: “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Catcher in the Rye” are particularly prevalent works. This whitewashed group needs to be diversified in order to empower Black readers. The Portland African American Leadership Forum wrote about this issue in their recent document titled “The People’s Plan.” The PLAAF wrote that educators need to be “well versed in Black history, culture, literature, etc. in order to contribute to accurate representation of Black studies.” It is crucial to include Black authors in what we are reading, to amplify Black voices.
Cosby, a Black man, wrote on his blog earlier this year that when he set out to write “Blacktop Wasteland,” he “wanted to write a story that explored the idea of poverty and violence from a perspective not usually seen in fiction,” what he refers to as the “rural African American perspective.” By reading Cosby’s masterpiece, readers can take a step toward understanding the manifold racism that is widespread in the United States today. In the same blog post, Cosby recalls his childhood, saying that his family members’ lives “were the worst country song you ever heard,” and that “the shining city on the hill didn’t shine it’s light on Mathews County Va back then.” Cosby’s voice needs to be amplified, and “Blacktop Wasteland” is a great place to start.
