A fine collection that explores and celebrates the ebb and flow of gay life.
Gay men struggle to find love in straitened circumstances in this volume of short stories.
Alley (Precincts of Light, 2010, etc.), a University of Oregon literature professor, sets his tales mostly in the Pacific Northwest, especially the fictional burg of Carleton Park, Oregon. He populates them with gay men, many of them in their downwardly mobile but still studly 50s—running-and-gym culture is a prominent milieu—engaged in June-November romances with hot dudes in their 20s and 30s. A retired judge helps a young cop ease into gay culture; a minor league umpire navigates boyfriend trouble while fielding homophobic catcalls from the stands; a depressed, jobless psychologist starring in a local production of The Full Monty faces the departure of his house painter lover; and a boy weathers his dad’s attempts to beat manhood into him and finds a haven in his stepfather’s tender solicitude. Other tales feature a laid-off electrician edging toward a rapprochement with his estranged son, a playwright who has written a terrible but very popular King Lear spoof; a bankrupted shopkeeper wallowing in drink, drugs, and rough trade until a near-death panic reinvigorates him; a disgraced ex-mayor reduced to being a bellhop providing emotional sustenance to a distraught track star; a teenager in the early 1960s, inspired by Beat culture, opening the closet door; and a homophobic Christian conservative in denial about his attraction to men going ballistic when a running pal comes out. In the title story, a man revisits his estranged lover, now dying of AIDS, and regales him with beautiful imagery. With sensitivity and deadpan humor, Alley’s luminous stories explore a wealth of characters and social types thrown into fertile combinations. His prose is limpid and straightforward, laced with droll psychology—“Garret found himself in the midst of a very familiar position where everything that was happening was his business, but even so he had nothing to say”—and sometimes opening into an evocative, elegiac poetry: “Times when in high school, looking out on a late afternoon, I would enter that bricklit life of deserted curbs in the city, newspapers blowing under cinderblocks at newsstands with no one seeing, and would wonder what it was like to be lonely.” The results are funny, poignant, and engrossing.
A fine collection that explores and celebrates the ebb and flow of gay life.Pub Date: March 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937627-32-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Chelsea Station Editions
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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