Publishers gave $100,000 to Seltzer (right) but not Kornfeld (left)

Last week, in a major literary scandal, it was revealed that Love & Consequences, a memoir depicting a white teenager living the gangland life of a character in an NWA song, was a fake perpetuated by a woman in middle-class Sherman Oaks, who had, before her unmasking as Starbucks patron Margaret Seltzer, managed to blow away the New York literary establishment with her raw street tales.

In the ensuing pretentious debate, there hasn’t been much attention to the text of the book itself, rave reviews of which have been rationalized as praise for a novel of powerful pathos. Judging from what’s online, however (I’ll blog more once my copy of the book arrives from Amazon–very excited), the book’s tragic arc seems to have been lifted from 2Pac memorial T-shirts.

The USA Today excerpt of the book is written in a cousin dialect of the joke gangster talk found on the Facebook page of many a white frat boy. Among various G’d-out stylistic quirks, the author, to show her undiminished hatred of rival gang the Crips, starts all c-words with the letter k.

Am I the only one reminded by this stuff of the work of The Onion’s gangster accountant?

Kornfeld

[T]ha tune remind me o’ my ol’ homie an’ mentor, CPA-ONE (R.I.P.). Damn, I wish he wuz still here. I don’t mean that in no homo way. It just that we could use a few moe strong Accountz Reeveevin’ bruthahs among tha livin’, ‘cuz down here it be war all around[...]

Next thang I knew, my Letta Opener headin’ straight foe his forehead…

Seltzer

The leaders of the gang were the OGs — “original gangsters.” To me they were like celebrities[...]

The next sounds were explosions [...] the steady bursts of an AK-47 and the strong, hard single explosions of handguns [...]

I had seen people get shot before, seen bodies lying in the street while the homicide people looked for clues, but I had never seen anyone I cared about laid out like that. Everything else blurred. All I could see was Kraziak. He must have been hit more than ten times. Blood bubbled out of his mouth and neck and he gasped, trying to breathe. One of the homies clutched him in his arms and held him up to keep him from choking on his own blood.

“Kall nine-one-one!” people yelled.

“Fukk nine-one-one!” the homie holding Kraziak yelled, “Someone get a kar, we gotta get him to the hospital. Let’s go!”[...]

I thought about the homies speeding off after the Crip car. As I turned the corner and saw my house with Big Mom in the doorway, I vowed to be like those Bloods, to get even. We were on our own in the City of Angels, and we were smoking niggas, sending them to heaven every day just to keep the name.

I mean, Kraziak? Don’t red flags go up in Manhattan when a guy in a street memoir has a name like a rapper invented by Larry David?