Slippery character Donnell Alexander’s left-field triumph BY SHARIFA RHODES-PITTS
	Ghetto Celebrity: Searching for My Father in Me By Donnell Alexander. Crown, 288 pages, $22.95.

Donnell Alexander might have been the Jackie Robinson of McSweeney’s. His essay "Are Black People Cooler Than White People?" had appeared in McSweeney’s predecessor, Might, and McSweeney’s itself was promising a book whose title and brief description suggested a boyz-in-da-hood coming-of-age memoir of the variety common throughout the ’90s and that had been made famous by McSweeney’s honcho Dave Eggers.

Alexander never did cross that color line, and the promised memoir, Ghetto Celebrity, is now available from a mainstream publisher. Alexander has noted that this change in plans results not from any falling-out with Eggers but from a shared understanding that the project had become too big for McSweeney’s. Although this statement is emblematic of the particular mix of bravado and self-confidence that courses through Alexander’s narrative, he’s right. Ghetto Celebrity is a book that should reach many more than the small nation of McSweeneyites.

It begins with an assertion of authenticity that has a lineage going back as far as the slave narratives, when the published tribulations of escaped bondsmen and bondswomen would bear a preface confirming the veracity of the story within. Alexander’s contemporary version comes in the form of a four-page "WARNING!" offered in aggressive bold print: "Constantly I got niggas tryna act like I ain’t ghetto. . . . " The warning is apt — this preamble of ghetto-realness may cause shortness of breath and the fear that the whole book will continue in the manner of this hilarious diatribe ("who am I to be talking to you, gentle-ass reader, in such impertinent tones?"). This defensiveness about his ghetto credentials drives the entire book: Alexander is, among other things, a self-professed nerd who has also had a brief flirtation with crack cocaine.

At the heart of his ambivalence is that stock character in the black American bildungsroman, the absent father. Growing up with his mother’s admonishments about "The Delbert in Me" sets young Donnell on the very path of "sawed-off ghetto celebrity" down which his father disappeared while chasing dreams of stardom as a musician, becoming addicted to heroin (or her-on, as it is always named in the pages of GC), and doing jail time. Dealing with his family history, Alexander narrates with a cool novelistic distance, in the third person. The wisecracking, cocksure shell recedes, to reveal a gentle storyteller.

It’s when the exuberant "I" returns that things cut loose. The raconteur returns, exiting his depressive home town of Sandusky, Ohio (having jettisoned the crack habit off stage), to coast through junior college in California. On the West Coast, Donnell finds love, and also his niche as a talented writer in the alternative press. Most of the book is given over to his development as a writer. Sometimes this comes in the form of earnest paeans to the discovery of his love and his talent for words. As the book progresses, this becomes almost distasteful. When we learn that "My hip-hop journalism was shot through with grace" and "I was sick. I was the one.", we understand that it is with words and not guns that Alexander approaches the deluded solipsism that is his inheritance as the son of a ghetto celebrity. After ascending the ranks of West Coast media, he pauses during an interview for ESPN: The Magazine to ask, "You do know I’m kind of an asshole, right?" (He takes the job, but it’s "like writing with a condom on.")

His relationships suffer, of course, and on occasion he pauses to consider. His Jehovah’s Witness mother can’t bear to read his "too raw" writing; their relationship is "the first casualty in the battle to escape my birthright." Meanwhile, his wife is "not DOA but slow-mo roadkill, an angel eaten up inside. It’s a crime that she’s paying for my ambition." He continues, "All this perceived power in my world of words and I can’t protect my family . . . how tortured I was that I might, say, define cool for America’s intelligentsia and admen, but couldn’t make things alright for my little sister."

Is it a relief or a disgrace that by the end Alexander hasn’t come to terms with any of this? Instead he’s glowing, "It’s easiest to love your ghetto celebrity when you know all you’ll ever do is have it and die." There are no pronouncements, no golden epiphanies. Whether fatalistic or simply a middle finger to the entire genre of soul-searching black-manhood memoir, Ghetto Celebrity announces a writer of genuine talent, if slippery character. Here is a book that is smart, complex, and taut. Despite the many evasions, there is genius in it, perhaps in everything that’s been left out. And there is promise for more: it is, after all, "a story of me . . . not the story of me;" and "a book about my life, not the book about my life."