An incisive but slightly uneven debut collection about the nuances of queer identity.
Queer characters break rules and make them in Manning's smart debut collection.
"My family had no rules," says the teenage narrator in the title story. "At least it felt that way for a time, because most of the rules were vague and unspoken." There's one rule, however, that the narrator and her sister, Stacy, come to understand: Being queer is not OK. Stacy is kicked out for "choosing" her sexuality, and the narrator runs away before her parents can reject her. But joining her sister's queer household comes with new rules that, while intended to keep her safe, wind up putting her in a vulnerable position. These are intellectually keen stories that measure the high cost of heteronormativity and also critique equally restrictive norms within the queer community. "I'm sensitive about being recognized as queer or radical," explains the narrator of "Ninety Days," whose lover, Denise, has left her to transition to being a man. Being outwardly femme means the narrator has to perform her queerness and "come out, multiple times a day." Sometimes the rule is that there are no rules. At least that's what the queer narrator of "Chewbacca and Clyde" thinks when she comes home from a backpacking trip and brags to her partner, Meredith, about having had sex with a man. "Who are you?" Meredith asks. Manning's overriding interest in sex, sexuality, and power means their characters are sometimes conscripted into playing specific roles that flatten them and some of these stories. But when they complicate the script, this work is a powerful testament to the complexity of identity and desire. "The term’s ‘bottom,’ " a character describes, "but it's not always about penetration." Instead, it's about the "the vulnerability and the weight and the pain...and the sheer disbelief that I was a space for claiming and fitting."
An incisive but slightly uneven debut collection about the nuances of queer identity.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-55152-799-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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