Awww, shizzle. Snoop Dogg wrote a novel. He’s ready to make an entrance on the literary scene, so back on up. Don’t worry about getting your Shizzolator all primed for translation, though. Snoop co-authored “Love Don’t Live Here No More” with five-time NCAAP award-winning playwright David E. Talbert, a partnership which, though obviously realer than Real-Deal Holyfield, unfortunately produced no groundbreaking novelistic uses of the –izzle suffix.
Snoop’s first foray into the literary world since “The Doggfather”—oh yes, there will be more; this is just volume one of “Doggy Tales”—follows a hero, fittingly named Ulysses, from the Long Beach. True to its epic promise, it begins in medias res, with Ulysses staring down a shoot-out with a Mexican drug dealer named Chino.
At heart, though, this is a classic tale of adolescent coming-of-age. With so much drama in the LBC, it’s kinda hard bein’ a teen who has to navigate his way through occasional high school attendance, puppy lovin’ under the football bleachers, daddy issues, an aspiring rap career and crack dealing. But move over, Holden Caulfield. It’s like this and like that and like this and, uh, Ulysses isn’t going to spend a lot of time whining about his feelings: he’s into action. As he tells us in the very first chapter, “I had two Glock 9s. It was time for me to use them.” Watch out, angst. Snoop’s gonna bust a cap in yo’ ass.
The plot trajectory doesn’t exactly keep you guessing, especially if you know anything about Snoop’s own life. But this is a book more about the characters and the beauty and boldness of its language. Where else on the contemporary literary scene can you find a mom who looks the other way when her pre-teen son sneaks some of her Courvoisier, a state care-giver named Crazy Betty who smokes crack or a classical piano-playing drug lord known as Buddha, who’s “big, black, and shiny, sportin’ the flyest finger waves”? Where can you find clever turns of phrase such as “it was all good in the Long Beach hood” and memorable images like of smoked-out strawberries missing teeth and the crackheads who try to sell them dentures? Where, indeed?
Despite the Hemingway-esque misogynistic attitude Ulysses displays of “Gs-up, hoes-down”, the Doggfather manages to give Henry James a run for his money with the sheer vividness of the descriptions he lavishes on the fairer sex—“She was like a child prodigy. A little Bobby Fisher, sexually speaking. Either that or a hoe,” and “She had more cakes than Duncan Hines. Looking thicker than a Snickers, but with more drama than the soaps.”
Snoop cleverly laces literary devices throughout like foreshadowing—“Shit was about to go down” and extended metaphor—“The circus had come to the ghetto. Mama was the ringmaster. We already had an ape and now we were about to get a clown.”
But the book isn’t just your typical navel-gazing work of an ivory tower genius. Snoop wants people to start questioning the status quo and following their dreams, their own personal manifest destiny, the historical origins of which he explicates with a mini-civic lesson: “They was like, ‘Fuck the Indians. This is our shit, and we gon’ take it. (Klonopin) By any means necessary.’” Take this rhetoric together with his arrest just last week for marijuana and gun possession in a California airport, and it’s clear that Snoop is aiming to gain the pantheon of transgressively great writers who resist oppressive governments worldwide.
Don’t be intimidated by this work of literary genius. I blazed my way through “Love Don’t Live Here No More”’s 226 pages in just a little over an hour, thanks in large part to the Suge Knight-size margins and type. There’s even a bonus CD thrown in on the inside cover so you can put a bumpin’ soundtrack to your reading experience. Snoop knows just what his readers want. The book ends with a giant cliffhanger, but there’s more to come, so just chill till the next episode. And if you only buy one book this fall, it should be this masterpiece, no dizzle.
