Bakersfield High School paper reviews Lords: Part One - By N.L. Belardes

Definitely the best review I have read of Lords: Part One. Check out the writing style of Bakersfield High School news co-editor, Tara Alire... she is an incredible young writer. Tip your hat to her style and wit...

Bakersfield Blue & White: Issue 3, Vol. 92, Dec. 2, 2005


"N.L. Belardes reveals Bakersfield's 'Dirty Little Secrets' in new novel"

by Tara Alire

Welcome to Hollywood's backyard, where a mysterious, looming cloud shields a conservative community filled to the brim with the delights of wonderful toy stores and the comforts of small-town suburbia from the outpouring British punk movement slowly gaining momentum in the gritty streets of Los Angeles. A town stocked with the ever-prized prowess of farmers frozen in an agrarian society, and sheltered from the lusts, sins and passions that drive the bustling city across the hill—as many passersby would often note mistakenly.

Instead, the dwellers live in quiet desperation, hanging on every word published in the locally-owned newspaper after a ravaging dust storm leaves the town resembling a "mutilated corpse" lying tragically at the valley bed. The town does not stir from its grave, but rather it surrenders itself to mass hysteria driven by fears of apocalypse and nuclear war.

Welcome to Bakersfield, California, a growing town haunted by an exclusive inner circle of the Bakersfield elite—the budding business owners, conservative politicians and the ancient college professors and police chiefs—known simply as the Lords.

At least the city envisioned by local Chicano author, N.L. Belardes, in Lords: Part One, his breakthrough novel that hit store shelves in December. Based on local legend, Lords is a crowning testimony for the exploited, innocent and simultaneously exalted lives slain by the local Lords.

In what may become his magnum opus, Lords is a cleverly satirical account of how the local media exploit public desperation through a carefully concocted imbalance between what is marketable and factually tangible. Simon Sundale, the owner of the local Tule Reader in the novel, admits he controls the masses through the local media. "I like to paint the picture ... that America's out of control, that people are out of control. My audience eats it up." Throughout the novel the mystical tule shrouds truth, but Belardes employs it as yet another powerful metaphor, an omnipresence of aristocratic control over what Bakersfield loves, hates and fears, and ultimately what Bakersfield holds to its moral canon.

Minstrel, the protagonist, leads into a descending spiral down the path to the Lords, the group of men who thrive on homosexual relations with boys in the Beach Park restroom and the sinister Oleander mansion. Minstrel's aesthetic, ethereal appearance contrasts from the decay that surrounds him; indeed, this was his allure to the Lords. Minstrel chooses, however, to act upon greed and capitalizes on his aesthetic appeal through prostitution, robbing himself of his boyhood innocence by violating the most fundamental, sacred social tenets when he surrenders his soul to lusty, middle-aged men.

Setting this novel apart amidst its contemporaries, Belardes seems to reject the understated style of modern literature and offers instead an alternative to novels written with a wearisome abundance of artistic license, whatever that is. Naturally, to exercise some artistic license is acceptable and should, in theory, further enhance the readers' experience as a supplement to the splendor of language fundaments. But American society has slaughtered the English language, most notably in such tragic attempts as The Lovely Bones and still sold millions.

To my utter delight, Belardes writes with such eloquence uncommonly seen in today's bookstores. He possesses the intellectual capacity to chip away at the shameful pillars these contemporary authors have stuck so ostensibly upon this generation's hill of enlightenment, and he does so with full force, replacing them with noble symbols of social progression. When read aloud the novel flows like a stream, which is quite a feat amid the disintegration of structure and form once idealized by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero. It seems he has drawn inspiration from the 19th-century aestheticians, akin to Oscar Wilde's classic The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nonetheless Belardes understands the importance of literary devices and the overall flow of the story, without which this novel would flounder in today's seemingly eternal stream of reality shows and teenage angst novels.

Without a doubt, Belardes has in his hands one of the last remnants of literary classicism, a wonderful satire of the decadence of the coveted, antiquated elements of society. Beneath the dense fog that shrouds the town, Belardes espouses, lies a rotten core of machination that has poisoned every Southern Valley seed from within through the wretched media—even more relevant considering the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the Iraqi war. Lords: Part One is a masterful, captivating rendition of small-town corruption and remains a stronghold of what substance Bakersfield has to offer.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Tuesday, December 20, 2005. You can leave your response.