Living for the City

In the South Central Los Angeles of the 1970s, the Crips were a nascent street gang and neighborhood blocks were just becoming ""territories to be defended as though the avenues and streets had natural resources or religious significance."" This is the setting for Tervalon's (Understand This) second book, a collection of 23 linked stories depicting the perilous, watch-your-back environment of an inner city--where a young man must deal with parental divorce, first love and the constant threat of violence all at once. The protagonists here are young black teenagers tumbling uncertainly through junior high and high school. As in many such tales, one central character (here, Garvy, who is featured in many of the stories) follows the straight and narrow path while others around him falter. As the stories progress, Garvy grows from a scared kid with a fondness for comics into a young man who dotes on his girlfriend. Meanwhile, drugs and violence affect not only his life but the lives of all those around him: his boss is severely beaten with a pool stick in the community center parking lot; his uncle Billy shoots and kills the abusive boyfriend of Garvy's cousin; his best friend, Gumbo, steals from a drug dealer and shoots a Crip who robbed him. Tervalon, a native of South Central L.A., forcefully evokes the pitfalls of urban adolescence. But the collection as a whole is so imbalanced and shapeless and the writing often so flat that the book is ultimately less satisfying as a work of fiction than as a series of snapshots of inner-city life. (Dec.)