Iceberg Slim 1969 [2011]. Pimp.
Iceberg Slim. 2011. Pimp: The Story of My Life. Trade pbk. ed. United States: Cash Money Content.
Another book I got from Sinykin’s Big Fiction, this time in a discussion of the history of Norton.
It’s difficult precisely to know what to say about this book. To begin with, in log-line terms, I’d describe it as a cross between Moll Flanders, The Game, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, with maybe a bit of Fanny Hill and Clockwork Orange thrown in. Like Moll Flanders, it is confessional, supposedly written now that the narrator has found God through middle class domesticity but really using the moralism as an opportunity for voyeurism. Like Sweet Sweetback, it is part of what would become known as Blaxploitation:
[S]upercharged, bad-talking, highly romanticized melodramas about Harlem superstuds, the pimps, the private eyes and the pushers who more or less singlehandedly make whitey’s corrupt world safe for black pimping, black private-eyeing and black pushing. (Canby 1976)
Like The Game (or at least the people described in The Game), it involves a detailed, loving, and profoundly misogynistic extended rumination on how to use psychological and physical terror to exploit women sexually. To a small degree it aims at sexual titillation: there is an early threesome at the beginning, and various other scenes of orgiastic sex. And finally, like A Clockwork Orange, it makes a huge deal out of linguistic matters: Iceberg writes and all his characters speak in an all-encompassing slang that can be decoded using a glossary at the back.
So is it any good? In a post-Sexual Politics (and especially Anita Hill) world, it is difficult to see past the intense misogyny, which the book wants us to understand as gritty realism (it reminds me a little of Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles in that way). And the use of the moralistic frame is so perfunctory, it would be annoying if it weren’t such a literary trope.
So I wouldn’t say good, and it isn’t a book I’d hand to somebody as a simple read; but I would say it is really well written: well-structured, solid dialogue and characters, and a narrator who — a bit like Tony Soprano — you end up wanting to succeed, as horrific as success is for those on whose backs (literally) it is earned. It is also interesting as a kind of model for My pafology, the Blaxploitation novel-within-a-novel in Everett’s Erasure. I really wonder at times if he wasn’t thinking about Pimp as he wrote that.
