Alright, so we got creamed in the Super Bowl, but don`t sleep on Oakland. This misunderstood city has imported some notorious product, and your life just hasn`t been the same since. We hit you hella hard with Hammer, kept you bouncing to Too Short, and sizzled your heart with Pac. After you got all amped from reading Huey P. Newton`s To Die For The People, you had to get your chill on with Tony! Toni! Toné! Dot-com bubbles blew up and burst, earthquakes tore through bridges and hills, and when you just couldn`t take anymore, you remembered that Ebonics would always be there when you needed them. Does all this sound suspiciously close to the Oakland you`ve already read about in an article somewhere?

In her daring debut, Danyel Smith paints a more intimate cityscape than her old job as editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine could ever allow. Refreshingly inattentive to cliché, her Oakland is populated by residents who resist expectation: one actually pays attention on school field trips only to drop out of college, another balks at confrontation then later shoots a friend in the foot. Like Danzy Senna`s Caucasia, More Like Wrestling evokes its decade faultlessly. The 1980s are a world of fruit-scented lotion, TV evenings, obligatory fun on weekends. A blind rush toward complacency to blot out the violence that is always percolating in memory and encroaching with each pump of blood. A world where the vulnerability of childhood never ends, and where the bus ride between school and home is the closest thing to a safety zone.

Smith splits the novel`s voice between two sisters, Paige and Pinch, who can at times count alcoholics, cockroaches and denial as housemates. The sisters are so close that sometimes you don`t know which one is speaking, but this closeness can suffocate them, forged as it is of necessity, of defiant survival. After their mother`s live-in boyfriend Seth uses Paige for a punching bag, the two sisters move into the top floor of a funky Victorian by themselves. (They`d never set MTV`s The Real World here — because the drama is too real.) Mom pays their rent but stays with Seth, and Paige expresses her resentment by playing mother to Pinch. With every meal, every home improvement, every you okay?, the double bind grows tighter. Paige becomes the protector although it is she who has been hurt, and Pinch aims to curb that pain through her silence and submission. Paige can`t take her own life seriously because she must, at least in her mind, give her all to Pinch; she must care for the girl inside herself that was never mothered. And how can either sister grow up when each has to raise the other?

But don`t mistake such crude analysis for a dynamic infinitely more subtle in Smith`s hands. From the first moments of the prologue, the details that begin to shape these characters are spellbinding in their accuracy and bizarre in their prominence. But this is the unique power of Smith`s tone, which merges the awkward reportage of teen diaries with poetic sweeps of metaphor. The way a biracial girl is idealized for being well off and down, the exact brand of footie socks a boy wears, the precise streets traveled to take the long way to a cemetery — these blunt facts are crucial because only they can fill the silence where emotions live. The journalist in Smith feeds us a rich sensory world, while letting the subtext ferment with menace.

Now if we`re talking the Oakland flatlands in the `80s, you can bet that menace has got something to do with crack. Folks young and old refer to the drug trade as the Climate, as if it is simply fog you can`t help but inhale. The boys in the crew Paige and Pinch roll with soon become dealers — as a matter of course. For the sisters, crack isn`t particularly evil, it`s just a neighbor you don`t see very often, or an annoyance when boys you think are cute start showing up at your door with ashy lips. The economy of crack can appeal, seem like a ramp toward easy living, make men who offer the same unswerving loyalty as mafiosos. Smith gives us a rare glimpse of the crack game from the perspective of the women supported by it. How you may have no idea of exactly what those men are doing out there, and you don`t want to. How it means you are neither poor nor rich, just taken care of. How even that tiny bit of security, no matter how precarious or temporary, can make you feel like you really have family.

The ease with which Smith writes such complex characters makes it seem as though she`s simply shedding an old skin. Her crack dealers aren`t flossing — in Oakland, they`re working early morning shifts at supermarkets and slanging on the side. The girls to whom the Panthers have bequeathed black supremacy still mutilate themselves even when there aren`t any white girls around to distort their sense of beauty and self-worth. Before he gets drunk and abusive, Seth teaches Paige the natural history of California that once fascinated her. Every assumption is eventually reversed, and no one is without contradiction.

And this is where Smith`s accumulation of circumstance and detail so breathlessly matches style to content — nothing in this shadowy world is ever permanent, or clear, or entirely revealed. This also means that when big things do happen or get explained, they can occasionally feel like an unwelcome dose of melodrama. It`s the smaller moments — a ravishing description of the sisters` mother swimming, a man pulling on his woman`s ponytail in his most tender expression of love, an antique teapot breaking — that are best able to carry the true weight of these characters` lives. While narrative structure is the weakest link in Smith`s talents, the novel doesn`t really depend on it. Smith`s supple language and the generosity she shows toward her own imagination and memory allows something new and real to emerge — a grittier, muckier story full of the uncertainty of life.

You can`t prepare for earthquakes. You don`t know when one will shatter all you know. But sometimes, Smith seems to say, an earthquake can be like music, taking you over completely: The bass was climbing up under my jeans, shivering the hairs on my legs, vibrating the cotton threads of my tank, steady thumping, pressing in on my breasts, pushing at my butt and back. For Paige and Pinch, their deadlocked lives cannot transform without this kind of impact, and Smith has the elemental force in her words to make us feel it.

Eisa Davis is the author of the plays Paper Armor, Umkovu and Bulrusher. The city of Oakland makes a cameo appearance in each. This review was first posted on africana.com.