Honky, by Dalton Conley
University of California Press, Berkeley
www.ucpress.edu
231 pp.

Dalton Conley was a white kid, a wimpy white kid, who couldn't connect with the African American gangsters and Latino hipsters he shared a needle-filled courtyard and his childhood with. The only honky (besides his younger sister and his parents who, incidentally, all adapted to their "minority" status and the surrounding culture much better than he did) in a dirty housing project in late 20th-century gothic Manhattan, Conley realized at a young age that he belonged to neither the low-income neighborhood he called home, nor the tonier and whiter Greenwich Village schools he sometimes attended. In fact, not only did Conley not belong, but he was also woefully uncool in both communities, choosing to hide his ghetto background from his genteel white friends, while at the same time unable to immerse himself in the rituals, language and games of the neighborhood in which he lived. As a result, Conley cultivated the persona of an outsider--the pasty boy who fits nowhere, who wanders both the junky and the ritzy playgrounds alone, self-conscious, proud and scared.
     Now an associate professor in Social Science at NYU, Honky is Conley's attempt to come to terms with this childhood. Conley explores his paradoxical identity as a member of both a circumstantial minority--poor guy was never picked for the sandlot baseball team because of his pale face--and the cultural majority, specifically the larger, broader and more privileged white (male) hegemony.
     Conley's story could be compelling; it has all the elements of a great Hollywood story--his best friend gets shot and is paralyzed, he accidentally sets fire to another friend's loft, his father is a gambler and an artist and his mother is a flake and a writer. But the elements don't come together to create a literary universe and Conley's prose is to blame. Halfway through, the book begins to read like a litany of complaints, nay, whines of a kid who thinks his parents really should've bought that loft in Soho when they had the chance. Conley does attempt to complicate his inherent position of class and racial advantage by revealing that he is, in fact, aware of these advantages, and that, furthermore, it is precisely these hidden and unfair advantages that his book is interrogating. However, when he does this, the prose doesn't rise above the level of a graduate student paper. For example, Conley's observation that "the privilege of the middle and upper classes in America [is] the right to make up the reasons things turn out the way they do, to construct our own narratives rather than having the media and society do it for us" is a sociology textbook insight, not literary truth.
     In addition to platitudinous thoughts on race and class, the book suffers from clunky attempts at Literature. Such sentences as "I had slipped into the darkness of the room barely noticed, the way one might enter a Native American sweat lodge after the ritual had already begun" and "Rahim's death preyed on my sense of morality like a dark lesion" call attention to their own awkwardness, as if announced by a dancing, trumpet-blowing rhino. In his author's notes, Conley writes that his book is a literary memoir, albeit one that is informed by sociology, and not a scientific study. But, true to the story of his life, the book is neither--it hangs between a dissertation and a work of art, isolated and stuck between the black and white worlds of literary truths and scientific observation, proudly unwilling (or unable) to synthesize the best both have to offer.
     That said, the book is an interesting addition to the ongoing (and imperative) American conversation about race, class, and the individual. Although it doesn't rise to the literary standard set by Wright's masterpiece Black Boy or even Nathan McCall's journalistic approach in Makes Me Wanna Holler, it does offer a unique and often ignored perspective on what it's like to grow up white in a community dominated in visible and overt ways by color.

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