Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? is Intellectual and Entertaining.
Posted on May 1, 2012
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Alison Bechdel’s new graphic novel Are You My Mother? is very different from her first, Fun Home. Are You My Mother? isn’t as much an examination of her mother’s life as it is an exploration of the nature of motherhood itself. It is a journey through the writings of Virginia Woolf, Donald Winnicott, Carl Jung, Adrienne Rich and many others. And while it is more challenging than Fun Home, it is also in the end, more rewarding.
For much of the book, Ms. Bechdel puts herself on the couch–literally and figuratively. And here the humor takes on a Woody Allen-like tone. But the humor never degenerates into schtick. (There will be no “lobster bib” jokes in this book.) It isn’t surprising that Ms. Bechdel goes through a few therapists. For as she freely admits, her underlying goal is to develop the ability to analyze herself–which ultimately she achieves. So while we follow her struggle to understand her childhood through therapy, we also follow her own disccovery of Carl Jung, Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein and Alice Miller.
Much of the humor of the book comes from dramatic irony. In one panel: Ms. Bechdel is in bed with a copy of Alice Miller’s The Drama of Gifted Child–deeply immersed. Her mechanic girlfriend–seemingly oblivious to the book–is carrying on what seems to be a completely one-sided conversation. Her caption: ”It’d be like working out of my own garage.”
Reading this amusing, highly intellectual book, it occurred to me that Alison Bechdel is a singular personality. One can’t help but wonder if she were raised in a more conventionally happy home if she would have turned out as she did. Fortunately we will never know.
I strongly recommend this book.
Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Are You My Mother? is published by Houghton Mifflin.
Colm Toibin’s The Empty Family is Great.
Posted on April 19, 2012
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Tonight the Publishing Triangle Awards will be announced in New York City. Let me say in advance: congratulations to the winners. And also to all the nominees. This year there was a bit of controversy as Band of Thebes’ Stephen Bottum asked the question: Why wasn’t Colm Toibin’s book of fiction, The Empty Family, nominated? I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Bottum. Only three of the stories in this collection could be labelled “gay.” And fortunately, I don’t have to make these decisions. I am, however, extremely grateful to Mr. Bottum for calling my attention to this book. Here is my long overdue review:
Who was it that said: ”Story is the second most primitive human need: after food and before shelter”? What is it about a compelling story that makes one drop everything–figuratively and sometimes literally? I found myself asking these questions recently when the phone rang. It was my partner calling to check in…blah, blah… ”Could you call me back later. I’m reading.” Then I dropped the phone’s receiver onto its base. I was in the middle of reading “The Street”: the longest story in Colm Toibin’s newest collection, The Empty Family. Although the story is almost seventy pages long, I found it impossible to put down. Mr. Toibin creates an emotional pull which is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited.” Like Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Toibin keeps the plotting of his story below the surface–the central dramatic questions unasked. In both of these stories, the plot sneaks up on you. You don’t even realize there is one at first. And then suddenly the phone rings. And you realize you are half way through it. And you can’t put it down.
“The Street” is the story of a Pakistani emigrant in Barcelona. He helps out at a barber shop, sells phone cards and then moves up to selling phones, but the world he inhabits seems almost as alien to him as it does to the reader. The turning point in the story comes when he realizes that one of his housemates sexually desires him. Mr Toiibin tells this story in a direct style that is all his own: telling much, only rarely describing the most essential details. The net result is literary and compelling.
While “The Street” is, in my opinion the best story in this collection, all of the others in this book are very good. The title story–”The Empty Family”–is so beautifully rendered that it demands to be read as poetry–slowly, savoring every individual paragraph. It is a simple variation on the Thomas Wolfe theme, You Can’t Go Home Again, but it is the characterizations and the sheer quality of the writing that define this story as a masterpiece.
The first story in the collection, “Silence,” is a witty exploration of the life of a woman mentioned in The Notebooks of Henry James. In “Two Women,” the main character is a successful (slightly bitter) film set designer. Her journey through filming Dublin is also a journey through her own memories of Dublin. This is a superbly written story. It is also surprisingly humorous. ”One Minus One” and “The Color of Shadows” are poignant explorations of witnessing the death of a loved one. ”Barcelona 1975″ explores the interface of sexuality and politics in the waning days of the Franco era. It features explicit descriptions of gay male orgies.
The third “gay story” in this collection is “The Pearl Fishers.” And it is much more complex than that label might imply. In multiple flashbacks, “The Pearl Fishers” tells the story of three friends from Catholic boarding school. And yes a priest is involved. This story is an exploration of the politics and church issues in contemporary Ireland. But for me this is a story about what it means to be gay today. Quite a rarity in literary fiction.
I’m no good at passing judgement on writers, but based on these stories, it strikes me that Colm Toibin might just be the best writer of fiction alive today.
Colm Toibin’s The Empty Family is published by Scribner.
UPDATE 4/20/12: Click here for the winners of this year’s Publishing Triangle Awards.
Christopher Bram’s Eminent Outlaws is an Intelligent Page-Turner
Posted on February 8, 2012
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 3 Comments
Let’s get this out of the way first: Christopher Bram’s, Eminent Outlaws is an important book. His well-written, intelligent history of gay (male) authors in America since World War Two is meticulously researched and will probably be referred to for many years to come. But this book is also a lot of fun. By intertwining the stories of the pioneers–Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood and Allen Ginsberg–Mr. Bram constructs a genuine page-turner. As the story progresses and more gay authors are introduced, Mr. Bram deftly handles this more complicated narrative in a way that perhaps only a good novelist could. The result is a volume that is both edifying and entertaining.
Part of what makes this book so entertaining is the strength of Mr. Bram’s literary opinions. The reader never doubts where where Mr. Bram stands. On Gore Vidal:
He could never admit it, of course, but Capote wrote better prose and Vidal resented it.
On Edmund White’s novel, Caracole:
It fails not because it’s straight, but because it’s dry and uninvolving.
On Edmund White’s novel, The Beautiful Room is Empty:
…I find it superior to its predecessor (A Boy’s Own Story), with better characters, stronger narrative and an exciting change in the protaganist.
On Michael Cunningham’s The Hours:
People who love Mrs. Dalloway often think less highly of The Hours.
I was frankly surprised at how consistently I found myself agreeing with Mr. Bram’s strong opinions, but my website shares a trait with Mr. Bram’s book: namely the search for quality literature. I counted only two cases where I disagreed with Mr. Bram’s literary assessments. On the play, Suddenly Last Summer:
Some people like it; I don’t.
I love the play. And I also found myself disagreeing with Mr. Bram about Edmund White’s novel, Farewell Symphony. There is a precision to Mr. Bram’s in depth analysis of this novel. And I don’t disagree with it. But Farewell Symphony remains for me a masterpiece. A flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless.
These are minor quibbles. And I personally don’t believe this book’s goal is to end the discussion on these authors and their works, but rather to begin it.
Eminent Outlaws is a tremendous achievement, because as the twenty-first century begins the number of successful gay authors has increased exponentially. They include: Edward Albee, Mart Crowley, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin, Stephen McCauley and Tony Kushner. Many of their stories have already come to an end, their lives–and careers–abruptly ended by AIDS. I am thinking in particular of Charles Ludlam and David Feinberg, who I knew personally. It would have been so easy for Mr. Bram to have left them out of this book. Mr. Ludlam’s plays are almost never revived and Mr. Feinberg’s novel, Eigthy-Sixed, is difficult to read today–perhaps because we still have not yet distanced ourselves from the AIDS crisis. But this is a thorough history. And leaving them out would be denying the reader of an essential part of our heritage.
I should also add that I strongly agree with Mr. Bram’s decision to include numerous homophobic, heterosexist reviews from the mainstream (even liberal) publications of the day. It’s easy to forget just how bigoted the attitudes were on homosexuality in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Reading these reviews today made me admire these gay authors all the more.
Christopher Bram’s Eminent Outlaws, The Gay Writers Who Changed America is published by Twelve Books.
Read Smut.
Posted on January 30, 2012
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 1 Comment
Classic is not a word that generally should be used about contemporary fiction. It’s probably best not to use the word until at least fifty years after publication–when the critical reception has at last been settled. Nevertheless, Alan Bennett’s new book already feels like a classic to me.
Two long short stories comprise Alan Bennett’s new book which is entitled: Smut. In the first, “The Greening of Mrs Donaldson”, a forty-nine year old widow finds herself taking in a couple of lodgers and working during the day performing as a patient for medical students. Pretending to have specific diseases so that second year med students can diagnose them is funny already. And the humor that arises from this situation feels entirely realistic. But it’s on the homefront where this story really kicks in. Because after two months of not paying rent, her lodgers have come up with a proposition: might she consider watching them have sex as payment? I won’t give away anymore. Except to say this story is perfectly plotted, with a few twists along the way and an ending that is both surprising and entirely logical.
In the second story, “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes,” a homosexual man, Graham Forbes, decides to marry a somewhat homely straight woman. His mother strongly disapproves of the marriage perhaps because she has come to tacitly accept her son’s extremely discrete homosexuality. The entrance of another woman into this family represents everything Mrs. Forbes has been shielding herself from. Namely: sex. A conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Forbes sums it up:
“I suppose they’ve…had it off.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Done it. Got his leg over.”
There was a pained silence. It was an ancient battleground…What she called it, what he called it and whether he was allowed to call it anything at all.
“I suppose you mean ‘made love’. Because I prefer not to think of it.”
“She’s probably,” said Mr. Forbes warming to the fray, “a bit of a goer.”
“A goer?” Edward, When are you going to learn that there are certain phrases you can not use?”
“I’ve heard Graham use it.”
“Graham is different. Graham is young, attractive and drives a sportscar. He has a life with the top down and language to match. He can say ‘guy’ and ‘bird’ and ‘cool’, all the things young people say. You can’t. I heard you say “tits” the other night at Maynard’s. You’re too old to say ‘tits’.”
Mrs. Forbes is not mistaken. Her son’s marriage does become the catalyst for sexual anarchy for the whole family. And the telling of this story–with lies heaped and piled–reveals much about hypocrisy and society’s need for secrecy.
If there is one thing that makes these stories great, it isn’t the plotting, the description or even the quality of the dialogue; it is the characterization. For whatever situations they might find themselves in, these characters are so lovingly rendered, so three dimensional that the reader can never doubt them. Perhaps that’s why these stories already feel like classics to me.
Alan Bennett’s Smut is published by Picador.
Jack Holmes and His Friend: Edmund White’s Wisest and Funniest
Posted on January 17, 2012
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 2 Comments
Edmund White’s new novel, Jack Holmes and his Friend tells the stories of two men–one straight and one gay–in the nineteen sixties and seventies. It isn’t surprising that Mr. White brilliantly describes the story of Jack Holmes–the gay character. (He covered similar territory in his memoir City Boy.) The big surprise of this book is how well he renders the straight character. Mr. White inhabits this character–telling his story in the first person. At times Mr. White projects this character’s heterosexist attitudes so well that it can be maddening to the reader. But Mr. White has created something unique here. And at the root of it are two characters who are three-dimensional, fully realized–sometimes surprising, but never inconsistent.
The glue that binds these two characters together is friendship. But this friendship isn’t exactly the Aristotelean ideal. Indeed it can be argued that this isn’t the story of a friendship at all, but rather of one gay man’s unrequited love for a straight man. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that these two characters–so different on the surface–live parallel lives and in the end come to possess values that are surprisingly similar.
Of course it isn’t accidental that Mr. White chose to set this novel when he did. The sixties and the seventies were a time of sexual revolution for straights as well as gays. And make no mistake this is a very sexy novel. And sometimes this can be surprisingly humorous. So while Jack Holmes and his Friend is Edmund White’s wisest novel it is also his funniest. Consider this paragraph:
Billy was naked, and his body looked much more childlike than Jack remembered. He had a shower-pink butt, very prominent and cherubic but unwobbling, and a kid’s little paunch with a tidy “inny” belly button and just a touch of blond pubic hair dusted around a small penis that curved snugly around his sac. His chest was hairless and flat and his arms slightly plump. Resting on top of so much childish inconsequence was a big, surprisingly adult head with horrible razor-cut hair, a geranium-red complexion, and a heavy smoker’s lines bracketing his mouth. Jack no longer found him attractive
I love the way Mr. White sums up the mounting humor of this paragraph with one short punchline.
I strongly recommend this novel.
Edmund White’s Jack Holmes and his Friend is published by Bloomsbury.
Five Good Queer-Friendly Coffee Table Books
Posted on December 21, 2011
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With the holidays upon us, it’s a good time to think about buying a high quality coffee table book as a gift. There are quite a lot of them to choose from this year. Here are five that are good:
1. Pilgrimage, Annie Leibovitz. There are no portraits in Annie Leibovitz’s new book. And yet it is fully inhabited with powerful personalities. Henry David Thoreau, Eleanor Roosevelt, Annie Oakley are all present here. Ms. Leibovitz achieves this effect by photographing places: Walden Pond, Val-Kill, the Annie Oakley Museum She also took photographs of the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and others, as well as of Niagara Falls and The Yosemite Valley. These photographs are deeply personal, beautiful and evocative. It’s nice to see that Ms. Leibovitz is at the height of her powers, exploring new territories–literally and figuratively.
2. Cecil Beaton The New York Years, Donald Albrecht. Quite simply this book is magnificent. Beautiful photos of Cecil Beaton’s duplex apartment at The Sherry Netherland, sketches and portraits of Marlon Brando, Greta Garbo, Elsa Maxwell, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Geldzahler, Martha Graham, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and many more. Donald Albrecht’s prose is lucid and intelligent. His exploration of Beaton’s complex relationship with Truman Capote is particularly thoughtful.
3. Gay in America, Scott Pasfield. It says something about the state of gay America that all of the subjects in this book look ordinary. These gay men are racially diverse, young and old and spread geographically across the country–in urban, suburban and rural locations. They are all attractive. And none of them looks particularly unusual. They don’t look like guys you’d see in a nightclub. They look like guys you’d bump into in the supermarket–if you were lucky. Even the super-sexy Dan Choi looks (almost) ordinary here. The photograph of him inside a bedroom of his boyhood home is beautiful, poignant. And yet he looks like the boy next door here. Which I guess he is. Now if only he’d just move next door to me.
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: The Official 50th Anniversary Companion, Sarah Gristwood. Truman Capote was notoriously disdainful of the film version of his novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but in some ways the movie is actually better than the book. Blake Edwards dispensed with the gratuitous racism at the beginning of the book. And he added a new character: Patricia Neal’s Chanel-suited cougar. Her brief appearance is the second best thing about the movie. The first best thing is of course Audrey Hepburn. This book features photographs of on location shooting of the movie, plus pages from the script, background on how the story developed and of course, numerous photographs of Ms. Hepburn waiting for her takes–effortlessly lounging in Givenchy.
5. Judy: A Legendary Career, John Fricke. Just how important is Judy Garland to gays today? In her lifetime, Ms. Garland had a huge gay following. ”Somewhere over the Rainbow” became a gay anthem. And Judy Garland’s funeral was for many years thought to be one of the catalysts of the Stonewall riots. But more recently, Steven Carter’s book largely debunked the Judy Garland funeral-Stonewall Riots connection. And today gay youths sometimes only know of Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz(!) For those who wish to dig deeper, may I suggest: Judy: A Legendary Career. It is a beautifully-produced, richly illustrated book of all of Ms. Garland’s films. Even the minor ones get some coverage here including: gorgeous photographs of on set filming, plus backstories on the film, its opening, box office etc. If you’d like to read the negative and positive critical responses to (say) I Could Go On Singing (yes, it did get some good reviews) then this book is for you.
Edmund White’s Sacred Monsters is Richly Rewarding.
Posted on November 29, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 1 Comment
Edmund White’s latest book, Sacred Monsters, is a collection of short profiles of artistic figures. In many ways Sacred Monsters is reminiscent of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, but unlike Mr. Strachey, Mr. White has no hidden or unhidden agendas here. These profiles are on the whole appreciative. And they are also objective. So while Mr. White can sometimes be brutally honest, his humanity always seeps through. It also helps that he knew several of his subjects personally.
As defined by Mr. White, a sacred monster–the English translation of the French expression, monstre sacre–is “a venerable or popular celebrity so well known that he or she is above criticism, a legend who despite eccentricities or faults cannot be measured by normal standards.” That covers a lot of ground. And Mr. White does not pretend to put all of the sacred monsters into this book, but his selections for this volume are interesting in themselves. Fifteen of them are queer. The rest are just fabulous. Like Edith Wharton who “toward the end of her life had twenty-two servants in two houses,” and “wrote the first draft of her most American novel Ethan Frome, in French as an exercise.” Mr. White always has just the right fun facts, but these essays are also surprisingly passionate, because Mr. White always has a deep personal connection to his subjects–even when he is writing about historical figures.
The arrangement of these essays isn’t obviously logical. The reader is asked to leap from Edith Wharton to John Cheever; from Ford Madox Ford to Truman Capote. And so you will be tempted to skip around. I must advise against this. Because the connections between these profiles are visceral. And if you do skip around, you might miss a surprising pleasure,”The Loves of the Falcon,” Mr. White’s profile of Glenway Wescott–an author who Mr. White was personally acquainted with. That said, I must say that Mr. White’s profile of Truman Capote, “Sweating Windows,” is my personal favorite. In fact, if you read no other essay in this book, you will have gotten your money’s worth with this one alone.
In “Sweating Mirrors,” Mr. White describes a summertime visit to Truman Capote’s apartment. It’s ninety-nine degrees outside and Mr. White is looking forward to some serious air conditioning. But Mr. Capote informs him that the air conditioning is broken and leads him into his hot, steamy apartment. It seems weird that the air conditioning could be broken in the ultra-modern United Nations Plaza building. And it gets weirder. Mr. Capote’s Music for Chameleons has just been published and Mr. White congratulates him on it. The interview that follows is punctuated by Mr. Capote’s quick trips to another room from which he emerges relaxed, reinvigorated and finally: unchanged. Along the way Robert Mapplethorpe and Marcus Leatherdale arrive to photograph him and he is seemingly unaffected by this sexy duo. And the interview continues. Music for Chameleons is dedicated to Tennessee Williams. Was this amends for the unflattering portrait in the Answered Prayers Esquire Magazine chapters?
Ah, Answered Prayers. That potentially great American novel that never quite got finished. Why not? Mr. White has given this some thought:
The rich have the means to realize their whims and the effrontery to avow their desires. Sex, travel gambling and intrigue are their sports, while itineraries and adulteries provide them with conversation, just as loyalty to the clan, devotion to fashion and the display of perfect manners constitute their virtues. Above all, jet-setters love a good story. Too bad Capote didn’t stay sober long enough to betray his friends more thoroughly.
Another personal favorite of mine is “The Strange Charms of John Cheever.” In it, Mr. White argues that it was Mr. Cheever’s sobriety and his acceptance of his homosexuality that lay at the root of his claim to literary greatness. On Falconer he writes:
What was remarkable was that Cheever had the sobriety to think through a novel and sustain its unified design. No longer were his pages inspired riffs held together with paper clips and chewing gum; now he’d turned out a shapely novel. Moreover there was a calm wisdom in this Falconer his masterpiece, and in it he had quietly come to terms with his homosexuality.
Mr. White is as comfortable writing about visual artists as he is about writers. Indeed some of his best writing can be found in his essays on Auguste Rodin and David Hockney. But in his Robert Mapplethorpe profile he really opens up. He begins by describing Mr. Mapplethorpe–who he knew personally in the late seventies and early eighties. ”Mapplethorpe…imposed his personal visual style on every element of his environment, from his simple, sturdy, virile Stickley furniture to his collections of glass and pottery to his own clothes, his saturnine leathers… rather supple, form-fitting Dutch black leathers elegantly seamed in blue.” And then Mr. White takes great pains to describe the historical context of Mr. Mapplethorpe’s work:
The exact historical and cultural moment of the late 1970’s in gay New York is hard to recreate partly because it was overshadowed after 1981 by the dark and ever growing anxiety generated by AIDS, which not only cast a pall over an earlier exuberance but also changed values so radically that one can scarcely understand that vanished era.
Mr. White spends much of this essay defending Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. Mr. Mapplethorpe’s photographs have been attacked from so many angles–left right and in between–that Mr. White’s responses to them can be dizzying. I’ve never been a huge fan of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, but reading the various attacks on him, it occurred to me that they all have one thing in common: sex. And this is where the historical context comes in. Because while there was once a time when sexuality was celebrated in our culture, that time has passed. As Mr. White puts it: ”Today…gay assimilationists play down the troubling question of sexuality altogether.” All the more reason for this queer reader to give Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs another look.
In all there are twenty-one profiles in this book. They include E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, James Merrill, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust and Henry James. The Paul Bowles profile, “The Desert of Solitude,” is particularly interesting, because Mr. White contrasts the plot of The Sheltering Sky with a remarkably similar trip he took with a friend who was dying of AIDS.
Sacred Monsters is another magnificent achievement from one of America’s great authors. I strongly recommend this book.
Edmund White’s Sacred Monsters is published by Magnus Books.
Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is Now Available in Paperback.
Posted on October 4, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Queer Lit News, Strong Recommendation | Leave a Comment
Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn–the latest Tales of the City installment–is available in paperback today.
As queer readers will recall, I loved this book. I was particularly impressed by how Mr. Maupin managed to pull together a reunion of the (surviving) characters in a way that feels natural and organic. San Francisco isn’t the same today as it was in the seventies and eighties and neither are these characters.They are older and in some cases wiser. But the joy for this queer reader is the realization that they are alive and (for the most part) well.
This is my favorite Tales of the City book because, quite simply, it is the most poignant. I strongly recommend this book.
Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is published by Harper Perennial.
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Happy Birthday Alison Bechdel!
Posted on September 10, 2011
Filed Under Happy Birthday!, Strong Recommendation | Leave a Comment
Until a few years ago Alison Bechdel was best known for “Dykes to Watch Out For.” This iconic comic strip provided regularly updated, humorous insights into the multi-faceted LGBT world.
And then In 2006 something dramatic happened to Ms. Bechdel: her memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was published. As queer readers will recall, I loved this book. It would however be somewhat more difficult to recall just how many awards and honors this graphic novel has received. My own count is thirteen–and you can click here for the list–but I probably missed a few.
Here is my updated review of Fun Home:
Proving Tolstoy’s statement that “every family is unhappy in its own way,” Ms. Bechdel presents us with a uniquely unhappy family. The fact that this family is her own makes this book all the more powerful. Reading it for the second time, it occurred to me that the graphic novel format is perfectly suited for the personal memoir. We remember our lives visually as well as verbally. And these memories are often in single frame with a short line of description and perhaps a sentence or two of contemporary understanding. As an example of this, Ms Bechdel draws a detailed panel of a family at church–the kids visibly bored, the mother deadpan and the father eyeing an altar boy in a slightly lecherous fashion. The caption above the image:
HE APPEARED TO BE AN IDEAL HUSBAND AND FATHER, FOR EXAMPLE.
And then, inlaid into the image, another caption:
BUT WOULD AN IDEAL HUSBAND HAVE SEX WITH TEENAGE BOYS?
The title of the book refers to Ms Bechdel’s childhood home. ”Fun home” is the kids’ ironic name for their house–which was also a funeral parlor. But this is doubly ironic, because this funeral parlor/house is something of a fun house. And Ms. Bechdel’s memoir is a hall of mirrors–in which her coming out represents a mirror image of her father’s (apparent) decision to remain in the closet.
Above all Fun Home is a deeply personal journey of discovery–a sincere, intelligent quest for human understanding.
I strongly recommend this book.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is published by Mariner Books.
Bob Smith’s New Novel, Remembrance of Things I Forgot, is Superb.
Posted on June 9, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 1 Comment
What is it about time travel that is so attractive to us? Is it nostalgia? Or is it the existential desire to free ourselves from time–the one element that defines our life experience as finite? For Bob Smith, author of the just published novel, Remembrance of Things I Forgot, the answer seems to be, quite simply: the desire to fix things. When the main character, John Sherktson, accidentally finds himself inside a time machine wittily labelled the Finney Room he makes the decision to transport himself back to the mid-nineteen-eighties, in order to stop George W. Bush from being president and to prevent his sister from committing suicide. It says something about the quality of Mr. Smith’s writing that he manages to somehow balance these two: historic political satire and compelling family drama. Because while there is no denying this is all a lot of fun–the plot to entrap a young George W. Bush in a photographed sex act is delightful–the primary motivation of John is serious. For this queer reader, the net result is a novel that is frequently humorous, a genuine page-turner and surprisingly moving.
As queer readers will recall, Mr. Smith is the author of the humorous novel, Selfish and Perverse. He was also the first openly gay comic to appear on the Tonight Show. And he wrote for MadTV for a few years. In short, he is a very funny man. And he has fun with the idea of time travel. As when he explores the idea of flirting with his twenty years younger self. Yes it’s easy to crack up someone who you know will definitely get all the jokes. But that doesn’t make it any less fun.
This is is a rare novel in that it gets better as it goes along. As the novel progresses, more characters are introduced and they are all well-rounded, complex and yes, frequently funny. I particularly enjoyed John’s mother, whose sense of humor is skeptical, even cynical. Her aversion to politicians is summed-up succinctly:
Politicians. Sometimes I think we need freedom from speeches.
His conspiracy theory-believing father is also very interesting. And Mr. Smith renders John’s Republican boyfriend as a multi-faceted character. He may be a Republican, but he’s also a mensch. And there’s always the possibility that something might happen in the book that will actually prevent him from becoming a Republican. We can always hope. And that’s what this novel is all about: hope.
I strongly recommend this book.
Bob Smith’s new novel Remembrance of Things I Forgot is published today.
University of Wisconsin Press.
UPDATE July 18, 2011: Check out the new promotional video for this book. One of the many highlights: Lea Delaria reading the Dick Cheney part.
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