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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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