Fadeout—a Dave Brandstetter Mystery by Joseph Hansen (University of Wisconsin Press 2004)
Cool, clean and elegant, this early gay mystery reads like
a chamber piece. There’s not an ounce of fat to trim on Hansen’s
first Brandstetter volume, a marvel of execution with a thoroughly admirable
protagonist and some remarkable erotic tension, despite a total lack of explicit
sex. The forensic evidence seems a bit dated by current CSI
standards, and Brandstetter’s leaps of logic are at times almost too good, but
the book’s architecture is flawless and its prose crisp and memorable.
Where could you find lines these days like, ‘You just know Keats died
young. Beauty is not truth and truth is not beauty,’ except
perhaps in the mouth of a drag queen?
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (FSG Classics 1970)
This quiet scream of nihilistic despair reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath’s The Bell
Jar and just about anything by Jack Kerouac. The story of Hollywood starlet Maria Wyeth’s
breakdown finds its film equivalent in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, where scenes
defy rational order and begin and end suddenly, their accumulated effect producing the
desired result. Wyeth’s story comes across as though moments in a life had come unstuck
and been played out randomly. Nearly 40 years after its publication, the effect is still
startling at times, though the ending (a choice between two nihilisms) feels somewhat
contrived, perhaps because a full portrait of Maria’s alter ego BZ just isn’t there in
the book’s lean, spare landscape.
A Casualty of War edited by Peter Burton (Arcadia 2008)
A Casualty of War is the delightful new collection of gay short fiction by renowned
English editor Peter Burton. Despite its title, the book’s themes are multifarious
and range from hardcore wartime tales to infectious comedy. It opens with a Kafkaesque
piece, When the Time Comes, by writer-director Neil Bartlett, and continues with a
heart-warming tale, Troubled, about nascent love in the punk era, by novelist/critic
Sebastian Beaumont. It includes work by three Canadians, including me, Patrick Roscoe
and Ian Young. Roscoe’s Mariposa, Butterfly reads like a Spanish fairy tale while
Young’s The Buggery Club is a real nostalgia piece for anyone out and living in
London in the ’80s. Thankfully, the collection also contains works by distinguished
writers from an earlier era, including Atti Innominabili by Michael Davidson, a
bittersweet look at adolescent sexuality, previously published to a limited readership
in the ’60s. Among my favourites (they’re all favourites, really) are Stephen Saylor’s
Kinder, Gentler, with its emotionally-charged ending, Cliff James’s The Violence of
the Gardener, with its superb noire twists, Richard Zimler’s perceptive take on
gay vs. racial tensions, A Dry Past, and the truly wonderful comic piece,
Awkward
Relations by Richard Haylock, the English novelist who died recently at 87. This
latter, a sort of Cage aux folles set in ’80s Morocco, alone is worth the price of
the volume.
The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor (Vintage Canada 2001)
Trevor has been called the ‘greatest living writer in English’—a pretty grand statement.
Much of his reputation stems from his exquisitely chiseled short stories, as notable for
their startling beauty as their limned perfection. The Hill Bachelors may not be the
greatest of his story collections—that crown would surely be claimed by After Rain, whose
every work is a masterpiece of subtlety and understatement. It is, however, a good book
to know Trevor by, and contains what may be the greatest of his short works, The Virgin’s
Gift, as evanescent and beautiful as anything he has done, with an ending so subtle I
almost missed it and had to read twice to catch the twist. This is not to diminish the
other pieces in the collection, each varied and distinctive. Like every Trevor story,
they unfold a world in miniature, revealing the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary,
and delivering the pleasures of unexpected revelation.
JULY
No Beautiful Shore by Beverley Stone (Cormorant Books)
God, I love a woman who can swear! And Beverley Stone is right up there with the best of them.
This beautiful, disturbing book is one of the most honest tales of contemporary Newfoundland I’ve
come across. Part-Trailer Park Boys and part-Thelma and Louise, it’s an account of teenagers
Bride Marsh and Wanda Stuckless’s attempt to leave out-port Newfoundland for life in Toronto,
a challenge much bigger than it sounds. Bride is the sexy one who gets hit on by men, while
Wanda is the entrepreneurial tomboy who sells dope to make her passage ‘away.’ Both prove
hindrances to their goal. A sharp blend of the comic and tragic, Stone’s story is filled with
wisdom, insight and some very deft writing.
The Unvanquished by William Faulkner (Vintage Books 1938)
This is a perfect little gem of a book, as concise and brilliantly conceived as
The Great Gatsby.
The action takes off like a rocket following the end of the American civil war. At the book’s
center are Bayard Sartoris, son of a confederate hero, and the slave Ringo, in a pairing as
memorable as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Bayard’s narration is one of the most successful and
appealing first-person voices in literature, as he gives a trenchant portrait of a society in
decline. Gone are Faulkner’s long-winded philosophical treatises, while his humour, drama and
moral ambiguities are sharpened with moving and powerful results. I only wonder why the book's
last word is "horses" rather than "courage."
Times Queer by Mykola Dementiuk (Synergy Press 2008)
Mykola Dementiuk is a twenty-first century Rimbaud, sketching a world sick with a surfeit of sex
and desire and characters confused by the nature of pleasure. Glimpsed through
the eyes of its youthful protagonist Richard Kozlovsky, Times Queer
offers twenty-one brief portraits illuminating the darker side of a world-famous
landmark.
Vienna Dolorosa by Mykola Dementiuk (Synergy Press 2007)
On Saturday, March 12, 1938, Hitler’s army marched into Vienna, looting, destroying and murdering
while the city’s inhabitants fled or stood by in shock hoping the cataclysm
wouldn’t touch them. At the novel’s heart is Frau Friska, a transvestite hotel
manager, and Petya, a young boy who lives off his earnings as a prostitute in
the hotel’s back rooms. Ruthless, cruel and unredemptive, Vienna Dolorosa
is a frightening portrait of a single day in which the glory that was Vienna
vanished overnight. This, Dementiuk seems to say, is what the end looks like
when it comes unawares. Dolorosa combines the seductive sleekness of
Cabaret with the heartbreaking realism of Bent. A powerful,
imaginative work by a compelling writer.
Mr. Phillips by John Lanchester (McClelland & Stewart 2000)
I was a bit surprised by this book. Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure,
is the funniest book I’ve ever read. For starters, it’s a novel disguised as a
cookbook. Yet this, his second book, I found only passably amusing. Much of
the humour centers on sex and sexual repression and to my mind the British just
aren’t at their best on the subject. (To be honest, only a gay man can
really do it justice. And yes, Margaret Cho qualifies as a gay man as far
as I’m concerned.) In Mr. Phillips, an accountant accustomed to living
life as a series of certainties and probabilities encounters a day so bizarre it
loses all meaning for him. After a series of random, improbable occurrences
upsets Mr. Phillips’s routine, he begins to reassess his entire life. The
set-up is fine and the novel isn’t a total snore, just oddly lacking in laughs.
But that’s what we get for having expectations, innit?
JUNE
The Ice House by Minette Walters (Pan Books 1992)
I’d heard conflicting reports about Walters’s books—both raves and pans. Recently
my father gave me a copy of Disordered Minds and I found it a genuine page-turner,
though the story came straight from the headlines of English tabloids. I’ve since
delved into her early books and find them far less convincing psychologically. Much
of it is geared to a TV level of writing, and both the characters and stories are
largely unbelievable. Add The Ice House to that list. I wondered then, why I still
enjoy Agatha Christie. Apart from some diabolically clever plotting, the prose is
horrible (no small statement considering she’s the best selling author in English,
surpassing even Shakespeare.) I think the secret lies with Christie’s characters:
she makes them believable in a way many contemporary mystery writers don’t, ratcheting
up the suspense with extraordinary plot turns instead. “Character is destiny.” So
proclaimed 6th century BCE Greek philosopher Heraclitus. All the special effects and
sensational plot twisting in the world doesn’t make that any less true in a murder mystery.
Murder Is Academic by Christine Poulson (St. Martin’s Minotaur 2002)
What’s interesting about this book is it’s an attempt to bring a naturalist take
to what often feels like a moribund, formulaic and increasingly unconvincing
genre. More an intellectual puzzle than a thriller, the suspense quotient is low
in Poulson's take on murder in academia, but the psychology is convincing
(except for one stunner where the victim of an attempted murder is left alone in
a hospital bed during a fire drill.) What if, the author seems to say, a murder
is committed but the people involved don’t recognize it as such? This is what it
might just look like.
Nine Stories by JD Salinger (Little, Brown and Company 1953)
I don’t recall when I first read Salinger’s short stories, but it was around
three decades ago. At the time I was a fan of The Catcher in the Rye, but
it’s the novellas I love now—they're perfection of a kind. Salinger once
considered himself Fitzgerald’s successor, and that’s evident here in the way he
shows off stylistically as well as in the adolescent humour typical of
Fitzgerald’s early writing. The pieces in this collection, once called
‘brilliant’ by critics, now seem showy and contrived: A Perfect Day for
Bananafish and even For Esmé—with Love and Squalor, which I thought I
would love again on second sight, but didn’t. The story that struck me as the
best of the lot is Teddy, about a 10-year-old mystic who predicts his own
death. It still gives me goosebumps. As ghoulish as it may sound, I’m looking
forward to seeing what waits to be published after Salinger’s death.
Landing by Emma Donoghue (Harcourt 2007)
Landing is a humorous and moving literary novel about a chance meeting
between a young Canadian woman and a middle-aged Irish woman on a plane over the
Atlantic. The encounter changes both their lives as Jude and Silé’s
long-distance relationship grows, against all expectations, leaving them to
straddle not only the Atlantic but also the pitfalls of culture shock and
commitment issues as the worldly Silé tries to come to terms with the younger
Jude’s life in rural Canada.
Other Men's Sons by Michael Rowe (Cormorant 2007)
Other Men’s Sons is the 2008 Randy Shilts Award-winning book of creative
non-fiction by Torontonian Michael Rowe. The writing is intelligent and witty
and the subjects varied—from the title essay about Michael and his partner’s
attending the wedding of their "adopted" straight son (whom they met when he was
19), through an essay about a young woman who grew up in a supportive gay
environment and had to learn to contend with other people’s homophobia, to the
story of Pvt. Barry Winchell, murdered by a fellow soldier when it was
discovered Winchell was dating a transsexual. Each of these pieces is insightful
and beautifully written but, perhaps best of all, the book is uplifting despite
its sometimes tragic themes.