‘The Heart’s History’ by Lewis DeSimone
Posted on May 15, 2012 by Trebor Healey in Fiction, Reviews
From the outset this is a beautifully-written and well-crafted book. DeSimone is clearly a writer who considers each sentence, and the result is good, clean, succinct prose. As we’re introduced to each character, DeSimone deftly illustrates their key character traits. There is no awkward dialog or clunky inserted descriptions in later scenes. One feels in good hands as he proceeds through the story, which spans a four year period (2002-2006) in the lives of a group of close-knit gay friends in Boston. (more…)
‘My Movie’ by David Pratt
Posted on May 6, 2012 by Howard G. Williams in Fiction, Reviews
David Pratt offers an assortment of both experimental and conventional narratives in his new fourteen-story collection, My Movie (Chelsea Station Editions). The experimental stories generate some noteworthy rewards, but it is the more traditional stories that are much more appealing and fulfilling in scope. Told from a character’s unique point of view, the conventional stories present a series of clear character driven narratives that cannily encapsulate small revelatory events and personal revelations that lead to gratifying endings. (more…)
‘Wingshooters’ by Nina Revoyr
Posted on May 2, 2012 by Sara Rauch in Fiction, Reviews
Nina Revoyr, author of The Necessary Hunger, The Age of Dreaming, and Southland (Lambda Literary Award, 2003), chronicles the struggles of a young bi-racial girl growing up in small-town Wisconsin. (more…)
‘Personal Saviors’ by Wesley Gibson
Posted on April 18, 2012 by Tom Cardamone in Fiction, Reviews
I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that writing a novel was like making popcorn: the characters were the kernels, all he did was turn up the heat. What’s most savory about Personal Saviors (Chelsea Station Editions) is neither the heat (which is a slow-slow suburban simmer) nor the characters (fantastic 1969 slices of Americana that they are), but rather the butter. The poetic prose that lacquers every page in a knowing pop culture hue is simply magnificent. While Personal Saviors possesses the bright fever of a first novel, this is Wesley Gibson’s third book, with another novel preceding this one as well as a New York City memoir. This might explain the sparkling, economic prose. He’s a mature stylist, but it’s the meaning found among the words that resonate long after the cover is closed. (more…)
‘Coral Glynn’ by Peter Cameron
Posted on April 10, 2012 by Viet Dinh in Fiction, Reviews
Reading Peter Cameron’s latest novel, Coral Glynn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I can’t help but feel as if I were watching a more contemporary episode of the PBS smash hit Downton Abbey. A looming manse on an expansive estate, tortured aristocracy, meaningful looks and glances—it’s all there. If, by some chance, Laura Linney reads the audio-book, the circle will be complete. (more…)
‘History of a Pleasure Seeker’ by Richard Mason
Posted on April 3, 2012 by Steven Cordova in Fiction, Reviews
It’s a challenge keeping your critical skills up when reviewing a book like History of a Pleasure Seeker (Knopf), and I’m not saying that just because the novel’s author, Richard Mason, is attractive and everyone at Knopf knows it (my hardback review copy came complete with an 8½” x 11” photograph!). I also admit the challenge here because History of a Pleasure Seeker—Mason’s fourth novel at the age of 34—is extremely well-written, extremely well-paced and so intricately plotted that it’s no surprise to learn that Mason clearly outlines his novels before he even begins to haggle with his first sentence. And if all that isn’t enough to make you hate this young Oxford graduate and nonprofit founder, you should also know that History of a Pleasure Seeker is a historical novel mainly set in Amsterdam with a brief foray into New York City—all during the Belle Époque. (more…)
‘Carry the One’ by Carol Anshaw
Posted on March 26, 2012 by Katherine V. Forrest in Fiction, Reviews
Carol Anshaw has, over twenty years, given us a mere four books. But what books they are. Aquamarine, her dazzling 1992 debut novel, imagined three plausible futures for Olympic swimmer Jesse Austin. Seven Moves, 1996, followed therapist Christine Snow’s determined and ultimately revealing search for a lover who has vanished seemingly without a trace. Lucky in the Corner, 2002, tracked the complex, fraught relationship between a daughter and her philandering lesbian mother. Ten long years later, we now have Carry the One (Simon & Schuster), a powerhouse of a novel so brilliant in its continuation of Anshaw’s themes, in the acuteness of her view of the range and idiosyncrasies of human behavior, that we can only wish all the more fervently for books more often from this most rewarding of writers.
The story opens in the aftermath of a wedding that has turned into an orgy of drinking and magic mushrooms, and hot lesbian sex for two women newly discovering each other. Carmen and Matt, the bride and groom, soon wave farewell to a carful of guests they know are intoxicated, a car that drives off into the black night with only its parking lights on. The passengers include Carmen’s brother and sister, Nick and Alice; Alice’s new sex interest, Maude, who is still making out with her in the backseat; and Olivia, Nick’s new girlfriend, the car’s very inebriated driver. “All of them,”Alice will later observe, “in their last hours of making mistakes with small prices.”
The character whose presence imbues Carry the One now makes her single appearance on stage, and she is there for about one second. That final second of her ten years of life is viewed through the eyes of Alice: “The first Alice saw of the girl was not her standing on the side of the road, or even running across it, but already thudding onto the hood of the car. A jumble of knees and elbows, and then her face, frozen in surprise, eyes wide open, huge on the other side of the windshield.”
With the ending of Casey Redman’s brief life, the present and future lives of six people—plus Casey’s poleaxed parents— tumble out of orbit.
Her death not so much hovers over these characters as it seeps in to color in very different ways their choices and behavior and experience over the years. Olivia, in the aftermath of her prison term for felony drunk driving; Alice and Nick in their addictions, physical and emotional:Alice, in a connection to Maude that she cannot seem to sever; Nick, gripped in the machinations and navigations of treatment for a viciously tenacious drug addiction. And bride Carmen, in her fundamental misreading of what her marriage to Matt is and isn’t.
We sit witness to lives that over the next twenty-five years play out against a travelling matte of cultural change that brings constant shocks of recognition. The country’s social activism, the Rwanda massacre, the fall of the Twin Towers; the Reagan presidency and its abortion-clinic wars; Bushes I and II and the hope-filled arrival of Barack Obama. Carmen is drawn into the social wars and Alice, whose life is haunted by her artistic imaginings of Casey, achieves success as a painter along with the expansion of her lesbian horizon. Nick becomes a revered astronomer in spite of himself. We are taken authentically into these lives and professions, and into the cities of Chicago and Amsterdam, and given such richness of detail and historical period that we inhabit not only their lives but their worlds.
The interweaving of their stories, with peripheral people drawn into and caught up in them, gains weight and power with each successive page, ever more compelling, unpredictable, hypnotic, the cross-hatching laid for each reader to parse out and trace back to Casey Redman, always tangible and tragic, always inhabiting their souls and the pages of this novel.
Carry the One appears to be a tale of guilt and recrimination, and it is and is not. Its substantive concern is the complexity of human lives and the healing power of time. In the mind of Olivia, the one character who has most visibly expiated her crime in prison: “Guilt, she discovered early on, was the easiest, the simplest response. Much more complicated was living past guilt, bearing the permanence, accommodating the weight of having done something terrible and completely undoable.”
The forceful impact of the novel is its relevance to most of us. Fortunately, few of us have experienced anything like the tragedy underpinning this story, but virtually all of us have been in some measure broadsided in a crossroads, suffered a death or an event that derailed us, sent our lives inexorably off in a new direction.
The fundamental pleasure of this fully realized novel, and of all of Anshaw’s work, may well be simply basking in the light-filled explorations of a first class intelligence. Basking in a wide, generous, compassionate and unfailingly fresh and interesting view of lesbian lives. Basking in the pleasure of language piercing in its specificity and precision, in the complete mastery of mood and tone and cadence. Most especially in fiction that is the highest of high art.
Let us hope we do not have to wait another ten years for another book from perhaps the finest lesbian writer in America today.
Carry the One
By Carol Anshaw
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover,9781451636888, 272pp.
March 2012
‘What You See in the Dark’ by Manuel Muñoz
Posted on March 20, 2012 by Edward Parker in Fiction, Reviews
At first glance at the dust jacket, What You See in the Dark (Algonquin) appears to be a thriller, a fact that may dissuade those readers who do not normally favour the genre. In fact, it does contain a murder, one that is, to the people of the town of Bakersfield at least, a bit of a mystery. But it’s still difficult to casually categorise Manuel Muñoz’s first novel. Mystery? Noir thriller? Romance? Literary fiction? Historical fiction? Meta-fiction? The answer, as it turns out, is all of the above. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, no need to worry. This book, with only minor exceptions, is a satisfying read, whatever your usual tastes.
Set primarily in the late 1950s in the California town of Bakersfield, the novel juxtaposes the circumstances of a small town romance that goes horribly wrong beside a fictional account of the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (part of which was filmed in Bakersfield).
That this is not a run-of-the-mill genre story is apparent from the start: an unnamed second person narrator is encountered on the first page. A second person point of view can sometimes make it difficult to suspend disbelief, but Muñoz uses it very engagingly in his first chapter. Nevertheless, many readers will still be relieved to discover that he switches to third person in chapter two and sticks to it for most of the novel.
The opening chapter largely relates the entire plot line of the Bakersfield characters, including—just as we’re coming to like them—the murder of one of the apparent main protagonists and the disappearance of the other. This sort of dramatic arc may be inconsistent with Freytag’s pyramid, but it is not unusual in a Hitchcock script, and is therefore quite appropriate. Subsequent chapters recount with greater detail roughly the same scenes from alternate perspectives, which provides the reader with strong visual images and fleshes out those characters who remain and who become, of necessity, more important.
The two narrative streams presented in alternating chapters are for the most structurally independent—the respective characters of each intersect with the others in only seemingly incidental ways. But this work is also intertextual, with the core narrative incorporating many indirect, non-parallel allusions to elements from Psycho. For instance, Arlene, a diner waitress who becomes the dominant character, also owns a twelve-room motel on the outskirts of town (where she lives with her adult son), a business that is destined to suffer with the impending construction of a new freeway.
In the Psycho narrative, Hitchcock and Janet Leigh both appear (as themselves), but Muñoz never names them, nor does he ever name the film. Rather, the characters are referred to only as “The Director” and “The Actress.” Referencing Psycho in this manner incorporates it more casually and prevents its cultural notoriety from overpowering the dominant narrative (particularly important since the characters would not then have known such notoriety). Both characters comment, primarily through their thoughts, on the changes taking place in their industry and, subsequently, in America and in themselves.
It is the subject of change that is perhaps the primary theme of this novel. As the 1960s dawned, conventional thinking about race and class, and about sexuality and morality, begin to undergo major shifts. The Actress and the waitress (Arlene) refer to these changes through their own filters, though each copes with these changes differently, in ways that are suggested by their own career identities. Janet Leigh adapts to the new realities through action (acceptance), while Arlene is left behind due to her propensity to wait (resistance).
One need not be well acquainted with Psycho in order to enjoy Muñoz’s storytelling skills, though undoubtedly some familiarity with the film is beneficial. After reading the novel, I watched the film again (for the first time since it appeared on television in the 70s), and became much more aware of the allusions contained within the text.
The Psycho chapters seemed slightly less captivating than those about the local Bakersfield characters, particularly chapter nine, when The Actress describes, at length, the technical aspects of the filming of Psycho‘s infamous shower scene. It’s quite possible that to a devoted film geek, particularly one who is also an avid Hitchcock enthusiast, it will be as compelling a chapter as it was a scene in the film, but others prone to restlessness may be briefly tempted to skip ahead a bit.
This is a minor quibble, however. Muñoz has written a fascinating and thought-provoking novel comprised of flowing prose that is rich in detail and interesting characters, and one that will satisfy readers of diverse tastes.
What You See in the Dark
By Manuel Muñoz
Algonquin
Paperback, 9781565125339, 288pp.
Hardcover (March 2011); March 2012 (Paperback)
‘Monstress’ by Lysley Tenorio
Posted on March 10, 2012 by Dan Lopez in Fiction, Reviews
The vibrant stories in Lysley Tenorio’s debut collection, Monstress (Ecco), depict an immigrant experience that reveals the implications of what it means to be a perpetual outsider. Intimate portrayals give way to larger meditations in these eight stories of Filipino fiction. (more…)
‘Growing Up Delicious’ by Marianne Banks
Posted on March 6, 2012 by Sara Rauch in Fiction, Reviews
In the opening scene of Marianne Banks’ first novel, Growing Up Delicious (Bella), the protagonist, Jennifer Andersen, admits something we’ve all felt one time or another: “The problem was I looked grown up but felt twelve years old.” The occasion for this insight? The imminent return to her hometown following the unexpected suicide of her estranged mother. It has been over 20 years since she last set foot in her hometown of Delicious, and for good reason. Yet, despite dealing with plenty of serious issues—being disowned, alcoholism, suicide, growing up gay in a small, God-fearing town—Growing Up Delicious is funny. And it’s laugh-out-loud funny, not because it tries to be, but because it is an astutely observed social commentary on small-town life and the lesbian experience. Banks captures it all with a light touch and a heavy dose of humor. (more…)
