An intriguing and well-written, if emotionally flat, rendering of a gay relationship under siege.
A doctor and his jazz pianist lover square off against intolerance in the Roaring Twenties in this knotty gay romance.
It’s 1923, and Carl Holman, a 32-year-old, up-and-coming surgeon in Portland, Oregon, is attending a society wedding reception when he is smitten with piano player Jimmy Harper. Jimmy sports sandy hair, a trim body, and a strong jaw line, all of them “bathed in light from a stained-glass skylight.” Carl must keep his ogling discreet since he doesn’t know if Jimmy would reciprocate his affections, and because gay sexuality is illegal. That’s just one of many bigotries plaguing Oregon, where the Ku Klux Klan is a potent political force that backs eugenics laws, an education act that could ban Roman Catholic schools, and a general suppression of suspicious cultural influences. (When Jimmy and his band start playing conspicuously Black-sounding hot jazz music at a dance, club-carrying Klan louts insist they cut it out.) Carl gingerly pursues Jimmy, who agrees to a fishing trip that escalates to skinny-dipping, lunch, a Chaplin movie, and a spontaneous make-out session. Jimmy’s fiancee, Mary, dumps him after he confesses his same-sex inclinations, and he moves into Carl’s house, which accommodates much graphic, untrammeled sex. Alas, a boy spies them kissing through a window and the ensuing gossip gets Carl ostracized by neighbors and patients and draws the wrath of his boss, a Klan stalwart who is pressuring him to join the Invisible Empire. Carl’s only hope of salvaging his career is to quiet all the talk by contracting a sham engagement to his lesbian pal Gwen Cook.
Stookey’s period piece, the first installment of his Medicine for the Blues Trilogy, paints a frank, atmospheric portrait of closeted gay life in a hostile time, full of furtive eye contact, assignations in parks, a claustrophobic dread of exposure and violence, and a poignant sense of being shunned and abandoned. (“I don’t want to end up a lonely old fairy,” mourns Jimmy after his breakup with Mary.) The author’s prose, filtered through Carl’s first-person voice and medical sensibility, is often vivid and evocative, whether he’s describing jazz—“The music writhed and pulsated like a heart on an operating table, refusing to stop beating, pounding with joy and rambunctious freedom”—or a sensual touch. (“We delighted in the way the pliable, soft skin rides over the bony areas and adheres to the muscled parts of the body, in the sensations of warmth from the flesh attached by sinews and ligaments to the sturdy armature of skeleton.”) Unfortunately, the novel’s nods to historical details (“I suppose you haven’t heard about the inflation in Germany”) and intellectual fads feel tacked on. Supporting characters like teen hustler Billy Butler, tragic queen Jerry the Fairy, and Gwen’s raucous lover, Charlene Devereaux, are lively and magnetic, but the romantic leads are not. Carl is a staid liberal, Jimmy a bland ingénue, and their interactions often feel stilted. (“Jimmy asked about my work and I shared with him some humorous encounters I’d had with patients recently. Then he told me a funny story about his Uncle Wally’s gall bladder operation.”) The result is a love story that feels more like a yarn about an acquaintance than a tale of real passion.
An intriguing and well-written, if emotionally flat, rendering of a gay relationship under siege.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-7326036-0-8
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Pictograph Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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