Tania Relf is on a Homerian quest to finish her super-cool snake tattoo before Snake, the super-cool tattoo artiste, dies of AIDS. During the weeks it takes to finish the tat, Tania falls in love, takes drugs, gets kidnapped, steals a dead body, gets tied up and likes it, supplies hospice care and blow jobs, and says “dude” a lot. Daily, Snake inks her from his deathbed and daily she changes his soiled sheets. Thankfully, even while dying and providing, they both wear jet-black.

Author Rex Rose’s prose is well-suited to this subject. Toast is fast-paced, slangy and sprinkled with generation E, X, Y and Z pop-cultural and collectible references – White Zombie and Godzilla, lunch boxes and eight-tracks, muscle cars and motorcycles. Yet, these trendy sprinklings are not randomly or gratuitously thrown into the text like so many yellow stars and green clovers; Toast is, above all, a search for the beauty and value lurking in the trash-ephemera underpinnings of contemporary drop-out America. The fact that Rose’s characters find their beauty in genital piercings, wide lapels, vampire teeth and heroin does not undermine their very human search for meaning, for a system around which to order their lives, for a religion and for family.

Rose’s unnamed narrator is a hipper-than-thou heroin addict floating in the detritus that is New Orleans and, like his subjects, longing to belong. In the introduction, we learn that he is a journalist who has been assigned by an unnamed magazine to write an article about the legendary girl with the snake tattoo. He soon decides, however, that “what actually happened is a narrative of greater-than-magazine-format dimensions,” and so he writes the book.

This convention makes Toast an unlikely heir to the nineteenth-century frame-tale narrative. The bulk of the book is told journalistically, in a detached, factual third person voice, with the narrator explaining how he came to tell the story during the introduction and conclusion. Rose’s singular stroke of genius, however, is to intersperse the text with interviews conducted during the narrator’s research. These interviews are oases of candor and conscience. The characters take a step back from the frenetic pace of the book and reflect on their own obsessions with drugs, music, body modification and the arduous path to cool. They and the narrator comment on the plot, talk about their own families and pasts, speculate about each other’s motivations, and argue over the difference between abject and object. It is only here that Rose allows his characters to escape from their unyielding allegiance to ironic fashion. In other words, when removed from the plot, no one worries about their hair or obsesses over Tania’s breasts.

And what breasts they are! Beautiful, spiritual and so very there, they are bigger and hipper than all of Toast. Tania’s epic quest to finish her tattoo is an end-in-itself, a spiritual awakening, a reason for living. At Snake’s funeral, she unveils his masterpiece, her finished snake tattoo, and performs an impromptu eulogy. “‘So look,’” she says, “‘Snake played with, like, the universe, and he probably stands for, like, everything we hate about ourselves, and also the, like, cosmic energy we love about ourselves. So, just, like, think of him as family, okay? He was one of our tribe, so just give him his props. He decorated us good, and that should mean something.’” In the world of Toast, like the colored frosting on a Pop Tart, the decoration is everything.

-R. Becker