Coming of age amid the horror of Nigeria's urban decay

GraceLand

By Chris Abani

Farrar Straus & Giroux,321 pp., $24

Americans know very little about the rest of the world. The rest of the world, however, knows a great deal about us. In Nigeria, for example, they know about our money, our movie stars, and our music. Nigerian culture is therefore a fertile mix of indigenous forms pollinated by contact with the United States. Indeed, Lagos may be the only place besides Memphis (Tennessee, not Egypt) where it seems entirely natural for a young man, the protagonist of Chris Abani's multilayered new novel, ''GraceLand," to be named Elvis.

Like many Nigerians, Elvis has had a hard life. His mother, Beatrice, died young and his father, Sunday, is ''a good man who has lost his way." Once a civic leader in the provincial town of Afikpo, Sunday has abandoned any hope he once had for himself or his nation. Now father and son have moved to the capital, where Sunday is a jobless alcoholic living off a new woman, and Elvis is a teenager on the loose.

Abani portrays Elvis's new home with vibrant anthropomorphic prose. On the first page, we get a storm that ''drowned" out all other sounds, the foundation of a building that ''wore green mold" and ''taps [that] stood in yards, forlorn and lonely." Even an architectural description of Maroko, the slum district where most of the book occurs, hums: ''Half of the town was built of a confused mix of clapboard, wood, cement and zinc sheets, raised above a swamp by means of stilts and wooden walkways. The other half, built on ground reclaimed from the sea, seemed to be clawing its way out of the primordial swamp, attempting to become something else." And just as human attributes are used to enliven objects, so this depiction of the city characterizes the book's protagonist.

Elvis, clawing his way out of the urban swamp, yearns for an artistic life. He goes from imitating the American hero whose name he adopted to dancing for cash -- sometimes with lonely women at clubs established for such purposes, and sometimes by himself as a street performer. Unfortunately, busking is not a highly remunerative profession, and Elvis finds himself drawn into low-level criminal enterprise by his friend, Redemption. First, they package drugs for export. Then, they accompany a more serious crew on a mission whose purpose they only accidentally discover when a mysterious cooler topples and spills forth an array of human body parts for export.

More horrifying, the shipment also includes several doleful children whose parts are destined to be harvested if the others go bad.

Life is precarious in these slums. The city is filled with beggars and thieves. Bumping -- literally -- into the wrong person (say a corrupt army colonel) at a disco can mean a death sentence. Regularly, Elvis sees the bodies of people hit by Lagos's insane traffic rotting by the side of the roadway. Why do those bodies remain? Well, the government has levied a fine on suicidal jaywalking and the families of the victims aren't allowed to pick up their loved ones unless the fine is paid. As for sanitation workers, they're either on strike or using the trucks for their own business.

Amid this daily horror show, Elvis could easily sink into fatalistic apathy, yet the boy has a sweet disposition and tries to hold to some moral compass. Also, he is rescued by books, any books. He picks up a used copy of Rilke's ''Letters to a Young Poet" as well as lurid, self-published pamphlets with titles like ''Mabel De Sweet Honey Dat Poured Away."

''Mabel" is an example of the so-called ''market literature" that exploded after World War II as Nigeria was transformed virtually overnight from a preliterate aural society to a written one. Uncountable thousands of bawdy sex tales and morality fables (many of them collected in Kurt Thometz's exuberant 2001 anthology, ''Life Turns Man Up and Down") flowed out of the eastern town of Onisha and then died abruptly along with more than a million people during the Biafra War of the '60s and '70s.

Like a cross between ''Mabel De Sweet Honey" and ''Letters to a Young Poet," Abani's ''GraceLand" is both a poetic meditation on urban decay and a coming-of-age picaresque. The narrative shifts back and forth between Elvis's younger life in the village and his current life at sea in the city. Interspersed throughout are recipes and quasi-spiritual folklore from the dead Beatrice's notebooks that Elvis always carries with him. Sometimes these elements fail to cohere, but that matters less than the novel's rich brew of sadness and ecstasy.

Above all, it's Nigeria itself, particularly the vast simmering stewpot of Lagos, that carries ''GraceLand." Abani creates an intensely vivid portrait of an artificial nation whose people have as much emotional vigor as natural resources and, scarily, some have as much likelihood of throwing away their potential as making the most of it. At one point, Elvis wonders, ''How could a place be so ugly and violent yet beautiful at the same time?" Indeed.

Melvin Jules Bukiet teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. His most recent book is ''A Faker's Dozen."