Literally Reruns Dodging Traffic by Tim Frank

There’s a great sense of loss on many levels in Tim Frank‘s first LS story, Dodging Traffic. The underlying suicidal nature of a childhood game; Nina’s bleak future; the neighbor who was “carried out on his shield,” and the inevitable assimilation of gentrification make this a multi-liveled marvel that is almost impossible to dissect–without going on and on.

It’s easier if you just read it. You won’t regret it.

Q: I find it terrible that generations of working class people give a neighborhood its life just to have it sucked away by money, which, though convenient, has no soul, has no capacity to lend an indefinable aura (the bad, the less) to a place other than secrecy and gates. Your thoughts?

Q: I find it equally terrible that working class neighborhoods attract gentrification via a certain degree of hopelessness. Was it your intent that the underlying sense of defeat influenced the life paths of Nina and the unnamed MC? (For even in success he can’t quite shake the old ways.)

Leila

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Dodging Traffic

Q: I find it terrible that generations of working class people give a neighborhood its life just to have it sucked away by money, which, though convenient, has no soul, has no capacity to lend an indefinable aura (the bad, the less) to a place other than secrecy and gates. Your thoughts?

Q1

Nina and the main character have separate breakdowns but their states of mind connect indirectly and symbolically to the collapse of the neighbourhood.
Their lives are painful but there’s an emotion and poignancy associated with the neighbourhood which is sadly destroyed as everything is gentrified.

Q: I find it equally terrible that working class neighborhoods attract gentrification via a certain degree of hopelessness. Was it your intent that the underlying sense of defeat influenced the life paths of Nina and the unnamed MC? (For even in success he can’t quite shake the old ways.)

Q2

Yes, there is the definite sense of hopelessness. As the neighbourhood changes, memories, even if they are painful memories, are lost and there’s something tragic about that.
By the end as the neighbourhood homes are literally torn apart and restructured, the characters are deeply affected in separate, but equally traumatising ways.