THE ART SCHOOL UNDERWORLD OF '80s NYC
REVIEW BY KERRY JOYCE
Sloane by Kevin Banks is a vivid and hysterical account of art school dorm life in the 1980’s, set within the walls of a cramped but also expansive, if your window faced the street, New York City high rise. This somewhat fictional account is written from the viewpoint of one of “the assholes down the hall making all the noise,” those guys.
It was a time when, if you lived in a dorm, telephones were something that existed down the hall. The phone company charged you twenty five cents—cash money in advance—just to rent one for three lousy minutes. Excitement? Excitement was something you either made or went out and found. Some could not, and it was not unusual for less imaginative folk to practically die of boredom.
Ah, but the lures and traps of pre-surveillance-state NYC were many, fortunately, and they even enjoyed a slight uptick when the main character of this tale, Evan, moved into town freshman year. With the keen eye of an illustrator and the slapstick sensibility of the Marx Brothers, Banks paints a picture of New York, its lows and a few of its highs, its sounds and smells as Evan, and his friends careen along from one near catastrophe of their own making to the next.
The subject matter is often raw, but the writing style is not. To keep a story this consistently funny on every page, while keeping the balls spinning of the plot, the setting, and the characters also, is something of an accomplishment. Banks has done it.
First and foremost a visual artist, an illustrator, Kevin Banks has enjoyed a good deal of success in the past three decades at the Boston Phoenix, notably. That training and experience comes through in the book. Sloane is in some ways like a graphic novel, but the pictures are made with words, and those words are really quite good.
When Banks has a scene inside of a train. You’re on the train. Even great writers at times, seem to treat the physical descriptions of the setting as something of an afterthought, or maybe they just don’t consider it important. But with TikTok and other social media, the culture has gotten much more intensely visual. Other writers might be advised to put a little more thought and care into the visual aspects of their stories, as Banks has done, quite effectively.
Sloane has lots of hooks, lots of punch lines, lots of simile, metaphor, punning, and all that goofy stuff that people who like to write, like to see in books they’re reading. And Banks packs it all in there without surrendering his edge. It’s as if he sold his soul to a wizened old English teacher, and then snatched his soul back, while one of his friends viciously clapped some erasers, as a diversion.
I guess we should have seen this coming
I got to know Kevin Banks as an artist back in the early nineties. I was among some people who were looking to take the ‘zine format to a different level, to make them more than just fold and staple productions with music reviews, and print thousands of copies, with cool artwork, and coverage of other parts of the city’s cultural life, besides just music.
The cool artwork part was where Banks came in, and helped lead the way. He helped get that critically important aspect of our efforts off to a strong start at Lollipop Magazine. His covers helped make Lollipop legit, worth picking up.
Back then, Lollipop had an office in Davis Square in Somerville, and there were huge numbers of writers, and artists, and musicians coming in and out. I thought the artists and illustrators were interesting, but as a writer, I just thought the writers were more interesting, and gave them most of my time and attention. Their demons were my demons.
But Banks was different. Everyone knew his demons were the big and the bad and in your face, but he would send his demons off over into the corner someplace, and have a nice quiet conversation, pussy ass writer style. I think in linguistics it’s called “code switching.” Still there were none who suspected that lurking inside of the cover art guy was an actual writer, who could tell a story with words, only why would you, when you have all of these colorful and in some cases sharp and pointy art supplies?
In addition to his cover art and other illustrations helping to put Lollipop on the map, Banks was a promoter, but not a ball of hype. He would promote projects, when they were still just that, projects, or ideas floating around in someone’s head. There are a lot of people in the Boston area, who would have to say, “thanks Kev, I owe you one,” for the boost he gave their artistic ambitions along the way.
For those reasons, I had to buy the book. I thought it was a graphic novel. The cover art guy wrote a book. It MUST be a graphic novel, right? Well it isn’t a graphic novel, although it is a novel that is graphic.
OK, so I had to buy it. I didn’t have to read it, or read it and enjoy it, or read it and laugh out loud but I did.
The cover art guy. It’s incredible.
Kerry Joyce is the former editor of Lollipop Magazine and lives in Rhode Island.