Queeroes by Steven Bereznai (Jambor Publishing 2009)

There's something in the water and it's making super-heroes out of queer teens and their gal pals at Nuffim High. And either you'll be offended that Steven Bereznai has parodied and queered your favourite current urban fantasy series, or you'll love it. Or possibly, like me, you won't notice, being mostly unaware of it. I was on chapter four, blithely reading along, before I caught on: "Oh—right: 'Save the gay—save the cheerleader.'" I haven't a geek-chic gene in my body, but I'm okay with it.

Troy and Chad and Gibbie and Mandy are all recognizable high school types: jocks and queer boys and geeks and cool Asian girly-girls. And they all come down with some pretty strange powers once they ingest the Etienne water. Of course, there are the other types who also come down with strange powers, too: the demento types like Liza and Devon, who you know are up to no good. It's more than just the usual high school rivalry when things get going. It's fun and dark and it's also a lesson in morality, while offering strong insights into the burgeoning emotions of teenagers who get in touch with more than just their usual hormones.

Had books like this been around when I was growing up queer, it might have made things a lot less difficult in high school and perhaps all those years later on. It might even have made it easier for a few gay boys to cheerlead for their high school football teams. And had there been some very smartly written books like this one back then, who knows what it might have done for queer self-esteem. But there weren't. Nonetheless, there are some now, so let's hope they make it into the hands of the people most likely to benefit from and enjoy them: queer teens looking for some very cool role models.

Born with a harelip and a cleft palate, Toshy Wolfsham's life hasn't been easy. What it has been is colourful. Growing up Jewish in Toronto in the 1930's, Toshy is surrounded by the politics of passion: Marxism, Communism, Anarchism. His sisters Lil and Bessie straddle both sides of the political mainstream: Lil befriends Red Emma Goldman, while Bessie works for the idle rich, rousing great enmity in the family. Politics, however, are merely the backdrop for this story of courage and integrity that begins in the Depression and ends decades later near the end of Toshy's life, a life that includes a stretch in prison for theft from Bessie's employers—a theft many felt was not undeserved. All is not what it seems, however, and the book holds a number of surprises, including a vivid recounting of the aged Toshy's journey to France in search of Goldman's former home, partly as a tribute to his sister. Perhaps best of all is Miller's deep insight into human nature and his uncanny ability to inhabit each of his widely varying characters fully and impressively.

Like Nathaniel West, Ronald Firbank makes his characters inhabit a cruel and arbitrary universe. Unlike West's characters, however, sadness and self-delusion are more likely to be their fate. Firbank's world is a pastiche of whimsy and doggerel, and Firbank seems intent on proving the meaninglessness and arbitrariness of existence, much like Samuel Beckett or Jean Genet, but without the profound moral allusions or observations. Not so much a story as illusory, sensual meandering, The Flower Beneath The Skin is a collage of characters and scenes that culminates with a revelation on the part of one of its many characters, Laura de Nazianzi, of the hopelessness of her love for a young prince named Yousef. Allan Hollinghurst calls Firbank's works a 'cosmopolitan fantasy.' I would call them something more: defiantly pointless and trivial in the extreme, but artistically so. These are moments of meaninglessness caught and deftly pinned to a board, momentary trifles soon forgotten, fireflies on an evening's stroll.

This, the tenth book in Bowen's famed Joanne Kilbourn series, catches up with Joanne and her new amour, Zachary Shreve, a charismatic handicapped lawyer who is both respected and feared. Zack has taken on a sensational case to defend a former folk-singer accused of attempting to murder a journalist who wrote a book that threatened to tear his family apart. The journalist, Kathryn Morrissey, is also feared but far less respected, as she remorselessly pins her subjects to the pages of her books like insects in a specimen box. Bowen deftly weaves her main plot and several subplots into a rich tapestry of everyday life and extraordinary occurrences, which somehow miraculously all culminate with the trial and its explosive aftermath. Bowen's characters are always people we know, or would like to know, for the most part. It's a marvel to watch her seemingly effortless joining of the book's wonderfully varied strands, each of which is illustrative of her theme: the endless knot of love that binds parents and children.

On seeing a smiling face crossing the Steam Whistle Brewery parking lot with a case of beer in hand, I said to myself, "There goes one happy fellow."  Five minutes later, the happy fellow popped into the green room where I sat waiting to read for an audience of brewery tourists.  Lucky me.  Grabbing a beer from the cooler, Bruce MacDonald sat and introduced himself as the previous reader.  Lucky him.

"Butterflies?" he asked, giving me a shrewd look.

"No," I said.  "Death In Key West," thinking he'd mistaken the title of my book.

"No, I meant do you get butterflies in your stomach before you read?" he replied.

"No, not usually," I said, not realizing I was smack dab in the middle of what could easily have passed for a scene in Bruce's debut novel, Coureurs de Bois.

Bruce nodded carefully.  He explained how he'd had to read over a whirling child whose parents seemed to think it perfectly natural for their son to be spinning up a storm in front of the makeshift stage.  "Sorry," he shrugged.  "I don't mean to make you nervous."

Too late.  But like Bruce, I, too, survived the whirling dervish, the adolescents munching Pringles and the mobs waiting thirstily for their brewery tour to begin.  One to remember.

A few days later, I began reading Bruce's novel: Cobb, aka Randall Seymour, is a First Nations Indian.  Recently released from prison, Cobb dreams he is about to be hanged.  At the last minute, however, he's rescued by Crow.  Crow has a mission for him.  About the same time, a naïve young Ottawa man named William Tobe has a vision while fasting.  The vision sends him to Toronto, rather than to law school as his family had planned.

Both men end up in Parkdale, Toronto's gritty west end that mirrors the upscale, mostly-white east end enclave known as "The Beach" like an evil twin.  In Parkdale, crooked cops, crack whores, pimps, and practitioners of magic exist comfortably alongside diner waiters, bank managers, convenience store owners, and residents of the nearby mental health centre.  In Parkdale, the insane are misunderstood geniuses and miracles happen amid the dirt and debris of everyday living.

It's here that Will and Cobb find their destinies as twenty-first century equivalents of the renegade coureurs de bois, running not furs but cigarettes.  The visionary Seymour, who "sees more", joins forces with William Tobe and his "will to become."  Cobb, of course, understands Will's vision, but can't tell him what it means.  As with any vision quest, he can only guide Will and help him to find out for himself, as Will eventually does, while making Cobb rich along the way.

Coureurs de Bois is a book of highly subversive humour.  It carries depth charges with each subtle, laid-back observation about our social system and why and how we mistreat our social cast-offs.  It's satire of a very high order, with the most unlikely mismatching of characters since Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude.  I read it with that rare sense of joy at discovering something refreshingly unique and occasionally startling.

One night, a few days after the brewery reading, I dreamed Bruce came to my house and left a frozen hamburger patty in my freezer.  Then he went away again without speaking.  I woke thinking of Cob and Will and their quests.  "Hmmm," I thought.  "This book has strong medicine."  If it's a vision quest, however, I have yet to learn what it means.  Maybe Bruce will know.  Though of course he won't be allowed to tell me.

Having a new anthology show up in my mailbox is a reminder I have one less publication ahead of me that my work will appear in.  Sad, but it’s how I think.  On the bright side, I’m always thrilled when the anthologies are smart looking, like the two volumes I was accepted in recently.  Boy Crazy, edited by the prolific Canadian Richard Labonté, is the first.  And it’s undoubtedly smart looking.  I’m happy to be included with established masters like Michael Rowe and James Magruder, as well as talented newcomers like Rob Wolfsham and Natty Soltesz.  The book’s subtitle, “Coming Out Erotica,” might seem a bit misleading.  For the most part, these stories aren’t about sex, but about self-discovery that comes through sexual awakening.  Most are just downright good writing, first and last.  All are filled with the unabashed ardour and joy of first time sexual intimacy.  Dale Chase’s Army Brat has a charming insouciance, while FA Pollard’s Game Boyz wins big for hottest and most natural sex scene, and Wolfsham’s nerd-boy voice in The Viking is irresistible.  Others, like Rowe’s August, Magruder’s Treasure Map, Soltesz’s Paperboys and Thomas Fuch’s Larry and His Father, will take you places you won’t expect to go and won’t forget either—the trick of accomplished writing.

Mix Cellini has triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13. Mix isn’t the luckiest of individuals to begin with, but his fascination with real-life English serial killer John Christie gets him in a lot more trouble than he bargains for. Rendell weaves modern day characters in and around historical facts, echoing Christie’s murdering spree in the ’40s and ’50s. My fascination with this book lies in having once lived in Ladbroke Grove right around the corner from where Christie killed. When I lived there in the mid-80s, the tales of a local killer had taken on an existence out of all proportion to actual fact. I heard stories about a man who had killed his wife and propped her body in the bay window to fool people into thinking she was still alive. In real life, Christie wrote letters under his wife’s name after she became his final victim, hoping to stave off inquiries from curious relatives.

Zebrun’s debut novel is a chilling work about a bi-coastal serial killer that might make you reconsider serial monogamy. It actually made me feel physically ill in places, though that’s the sort of endorsement not everyone will find endearing. Newspaper columnist Daniel Caruso has his own little fatal attraction that makes Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest look more like Dear Abby. This book will lay a very cool hand on your shoulder—read it if you dare. On a warmer note, I’m happy to report that Zebrun himself is delightful and witty and bears no resemblance to his characters, having shared a panel with him recently at the 2009 Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans where we discussed, among other contentious topics, whether or not mystery writers have a "formula." Shakespeare certainly had one, so I don’t mind saying I do too.

You want to like John Giorno because his work is so passionately felt, so passionately lived, if a little lost in the beat consciousness of revised Zen Buddhism, and also because William S. Burroughs told us we should, told us we should, told us we should. But it’s hard, you know, and it’s hard, it’s hard, and if you don’t like the style of this review then you probably won’t like Giorno, won’t like Giorno, like Giorno and his reductionist poetic fantasies, in which he writes lines like, "I want to be filthy and anonymous, scum and slime." In Shine, Giorno comes across as a raging volcano bearing witness to some almost unspeakable truth, but in actuality it’s a very suspect and unreliable sort of truth. When Giorno describes an unsafe sexual encounter with the young, hiv-positive Keith Haring—who did not disclose his health concerns—as an act of "genuine love" motivated by "pure intentions," you can’t help wanting to shake him. "John, John, John," you want to say. "Can you not see Haring was risking passing on the virus in what might more readily be described as an act of pure selfish recklessness or callous revenge against the world than any desire to ‘radiate enough compassion to fill the world’?" But no, Giorno is blind to such thoughts. Does that make him a saint, as Burroughs suggests? Then again, who was William Burroughs but some guy who shot his wife in Mexico because he couldn’t get off drugs, and later achieved some sort of immortality because he wrote a famous book because he couldn’t get off drugs, and then was further immortalized in some movie about a bunch of people who couldn’t get off drugs … but is that really enough to canonize these guys?

Every once in a while I pick up a mystery that really zings—not just with story, but with character and clever writing. This is one of them. Rotenberg takes us to the heart of Shanghai, China’s most populated city. Detective Zhong is called on to investigate the apparent suicide of his wife’s former lover, Canadian theatre director Geoffrey Hyland. But of course it’s not a suicide and there are many suspects, including most of the cast of Hamlet, which Hyland has come to China to direct. The description of Shanghai and its residents is priceless and unsettling. Rotenberg has an astute grasp of the political and social realities of modern China, and it’s probably not by chance the book often sounds like a warning knell. With his theatre background, Rotenberg delivers some keen insight into the vicissitudes of human nature that would impress Shakespeare.

You know that a book written by a one-time punk musician is going to have street cred, though what else it may contain is anybody’s guess. In this case, intelligence, suspense, and some fun political theorizing. Scotsman Reeve is a former SAS officer who trains weekend warriors in the art of tracking and overpowering imaginary enemies. He doesn’t know how handy those talents will come in until he receives a call saying his journalist brother has been found dead in San Diego. The web Reeve unravels to find his brother’s murderers is long and sordid, and would do any conspiracy theorist proud. For the most part, it’s amusing to watch Reeve at work in this tale of physical and intellectual warfare. Rankin has a big reputation among the thriller set, and it’s deserved, though the downside is that the writing doesn’t shine. Words have no importance here—one can just as easily be substituted for another with no detriment to the book. The story’s the thing, and it moves and moves, though if it stopped moving, it would very likely collapse. There’s a lot of sound and fury signifying little, apart from some brief philosophising on the nature of power.

An acquaintance and I once discussed our respective literary tastes. His litmus test was The English Patient. He wouldn’t credit the taste of anyone who admired that book. Ironically, it was also my test. I couldn’t credit the taste of anyone who didn’t understand what makes it great. It’s not snobbishness; it’s about values. In TEP, words are magic. Or rather, how they’re used is the magic, since few words have currency on their own these days. If you have a tin ear for words, the writing won’t entice you. "What about The Great Gatsby?" he asked, not knowing he’d touched on my ne plus ultra. "It’s pretty boring," he said. To him it was simply a story about a love triangle. Or rather, two love triangles that bisect, with a narrator standing outside each squaring the hypotenuse. Seen in that way it would be pretty boring, but if you have an ear for words, it’s magic. While Rankin’s story rocks, his ear for words is the equivalent of punk music. It’s about raw, primary power, not subtlety and certainly not magic.

The 20^th Century was dotted with literary groups (Bloomsbury, Stein’s Paris Circle, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.) Many of these influenced the course of literary history; all were dominated by gays and lesbians. (Yes, all—check the rosters, if you don’t believe me.) The Violet Quill met only eight times between 1980-81, yet it was the first official group created with the express aim of writing to and for a gay readership. The seven men who comprised the VQ—Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, George Whitmore, Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley—all met in a personal capacity before throwing in their lot as a literary "movement."

Published 13 years after the official "disbanding" of the group, The Violet Quill Reader contains work by all seven writers, including a formerly unpublished story by Cox, who produced little and died young (as did Grumley, Ferro and Whitmore), as well as letters and diary entries detailing the group’s short-lived formal activities. By all accounts, the group shared a basic political outlook (gay liberation theology), but not an aesthetic one. Their work does not constitute a school of any sort, apart from that of being written by and for gays in what is now loosely called "the post-Stonewall era."

Bergman has carefully shaped the book to reveal the evolution of the writers before, during and after the group (only Holleran, whose famed Dancer From The Dance was among the first best-selling pieces of Gaylit, seems to have come to the group with his style fully-formed), as well as to frame their work in an historic context. It opens with White’s wonderful firsthand account of the Stonewall Riots, and some early letters of Holleran and Ferro not long after the two met at a Writers’ Workshop in 1965. It ends with Holleran’s tribute to Ferro, following his death to aids in 1989.

While the work no longer seems revolutionary (Whitmore’s The Confessions of Danny Slocum, for instance, reads like very slow literary foreplay, and White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples is nothing more than self-indulgent "poetic" gobbledegook), in its day much of it was revelatory. Under the group’s influence, individual members began producing far more notable work and were considered among the most successful gay authors of their generation. And while much of it covers familiar territory (coming out, facing discrimination, living with aids), a good deal of it remains powerful: the excerpt from Whitmore’s Nebraska is gripping, as is the one from Ferro’s last work, From Life Drawing. There are some memorable short pieces as well, like White’s intriguing An Oracle, and the droll Whitmore short story, Getting Rid of Robert, a "biographical" work that threatened to tear the VQ apart.

While the amount and the quality of work produced by individual members differs greatly, the group’s collective influence on GayLit has been huge, and its value perhaps only now beginning to be recognized. The remaining members, White, Holleran and Picano, are to be honoured by the Lambda Literary Foundation with the 2009 Pioneer Award next month. And though with hindsight the VQ may seem to have been a movement whose time had come, we owe much to those who marched before it became entirely fashionable to do so.

I first came across RM Vaughan’s poetry in the mid-90s, when I was editing the Church-Wellesley Review. I was struck immediately by his unique voice and knew we would be hearing more from him. Most recently that voice has given rise to a stunning work based on Vaughan’s doomed and illicit affair with his psychiatrist in the late-1990s. In poetry, journal excerpts, letters and legal documents, he details his infatuation with his therapist, followed by the affair and its aftermath, including Vaughan’s breakdown over a betrayal by the man who he felt knew him best. It’s harrowing and brilliant. Had this book been written by a woman, award committees would have fallen over themselves to give it first place anything. Instead, because it’s the work of a self-described gay “fattie”, it has been appallingly and predictably overlooked by nearly everyone. Welcome to the Can-Lit Ghetto.

Although on the surface it might read like a slight novel, A Jest Of God has heft because of its slow, masterful execution. The tale of Rachel Cameron, a chronically repressed “spinster” in small town Manitoba, is nothing more nor less than the carefully detailed disintegration of a personality operating on guilt and fear. Rachel lives with her dying mother above a funeral parlour once owned by her alcoholic, reclusive father. She’s still a virgin at 30, until she meets boyhood school chum Nick Kazlik, who manages to get through her shell, then tosses her aside when she responds to his advances. Rachel’s interior monologues and constant self-reproach are pitched to annoy, but you still want her to win and so you stick with her, despite the odds and the oddities in her personality. If this were a painting, it would be Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, a portrait so bleak it hurts to look at it.

Keith Garebian’s Blue is a haunting elegy to an artist whose films left an indelible mark on queer consciousness, as much because of Jarman’s brashness at a time when we were all battening down the hatches and doing damage control in our own lives, both public and private, because of the onslaught of aids, as well as because of Jarman’s uniquely personal vision as a filmmaker.

The poems reverberate with an intimate and cumulative knowledge of the artist’s work seen in hindsight. At times, they achieve a visionary quality that stems from a critical perception of Jarman’s oeuvre, coupled with Garebian’s personal imagining of the man behind the work. In this way, the poems serve as both biography and critical exegesis of the films. Edward II: A Queer History, for instance, is as much a snapshot of Jarman’s film as of his imagining of the misbegotten monarch who bears its title, while the multi-part Caravaggio serves as a series of vignettes illuminating both the historical artist and his modern-day artist-biographer.

While not lengthy, Blue is a full work. The book is cleverly divided into a biographical Prologue, a critical Corpus, and a final section, Blue, that serves as a meditation on the dying Jarman and his final work, Blue, a non-imagistic “film” that provided a backdrop for Jarman’s ponderings on life, death and art.

These works contain both vibrant imagery and richly imagined drama, and are a pleasure to read. They should be—they were written by a masterly word-artist and inventor who might, had the two met, have mesmerized Jarman with his own creativity.

Reading this book reminded me of the dull, dreary assignments given by unimaginative high school teachers to English students. The long-winded prose, while grammatically correct, has nothing of the elegance and beauty of Proust’s equally long, if not longer, sentence structures. You want to dust these sentences, not read them. And yet, by the end of the book, I’d become fascinated by this tale told by an obsessive governess of her two young wards, Miles and Flora, whom she suspects of being in collusion with the malevolent ghosts of two former servants.

What fascinated me even more is the more than a century of heated criticism about this brief tale that, wittingly or not, dissects the nature of human perception as much as the story at hand. That highly prescient neurasthenic, Virginia Woolf, seemed to have sensed the cataclysmic divide in humanity that occurred little more than a decade after the story’s publication, when she proclaimed that, “In or about December, 1910, human character changed…”. She was right, of course. It was in this year that Russian painter Wassily Kandinksy painted what is believed to be the first true and purposely abstract work of art, entitled appropriately, “First Abstraction.” With this one work, Kandinsky had an effect on human consciousness that was as great as, or possibly greater than, the understanding that dawned when art progressed from stick drawings to drawings with a multi-linear perspective. With this painting, Kandinsky made visual the connecting of human consciousness with our subconscious, what had once been solely the provenance of occultists. Others saw it in Freudian terms, of course, though it amounted to the same thing. It was this very subject—the subconscious—that Freud was absorbed in exploring.

Thus, criticism of this seminal text is divided into people who see it as a ghost story, pure and simple (the non-Freudians) and those who see it as an in-depth analysis of the psyche of a very disturbed young woman with sexual overtones (the Freudians.) Few, if any, have commented on the inherent lesbian undertones in the actions of the confused Miss Kenton, but perhaps the vast majority of Freudians are, like the story’s governess, too polite to mention such things for want of precipitating their own psychological implosion.

It’s impossible to read a book like this and separate it from its political background. Graham’s wartime novel about the daughter of a wealthy Montreal Anglophone family who falls in love with a middle-class Jew from Northern Ontario was written to illustrate her personal conviction that Canada was not doing enough to help the Jews of Europe in their hour of need. She’d experienced life in pre-war Europe, learning first-hand what it was like for ethnic minorities there while attending school in Switzerland in the 1930s. She’d written frankly about those experiences for Saturday Night Magazine and fought her own battles against Canadian hypocrisy toward a people euphemistically called “the refugees.” As Norman Ravvin says in his introduction to the Cormorant re-release, this book is not part of Holocaust Literature, yet it can be considered an early contribution to “writing about the Jewish experience in Canada.” It can also be seen as an example of early feminist writing in Canada, for the story is as much about Erica Drake’s fight to love a Jewish man as it is about her emerging identity consciousness and her struggle against then-prevailing attitudes about a woman’s “role” in life and love.

In many ways, this was Canada’s first bestseller, with sales topping more than a million and a half copies, as well as winning the Governor General’s Award and having its film rights purchased by Samuel Goldwyn (for Katherine Hepburn, though the film was never made.) In a recent article, Cormorant publisher Marc Côté compared Graham’s writing to that of John Steinbeck. The comparison is apt. While it may not be high literature, it is high family drama, richly imagined. It speaks about our past, as Canadians, at a time when costly mistakes were made far too easily because of the misguided thinking of far too few. As a member of an invisible minority, I frequently found Graham’s treatment of her theme riveting. Would that there were more books like this to speak of what it really means to live outside accepted convention, whether by choice or by birth, and pay too high a price for doing so.

Victor is a sweetly goofy personal trainer at a downtown Toronto gym. He’s the kind of guy who says "metaphysical" instead of "metaphoric" and files Rachmaninoff next to Roch Voisine in his CD collection, and all without irony. He’s a jock and he’s content. Then along comes the new client, Doug, a hetero diamond-in-the-rough who starts off with abs of flab, yet still manages to rock Victor’s world (which admittedly consists largely of the gym and the gay ghetto.) Still, there is more to this mixed-up attraction than meets the eye. The reader knows it and Victor senses it, even while Doug denies denies denies. Of course, there’s trouble a-brewing (isn’t there always?) for the ill-fated pair in this sweetly smart romance. Every time it seems like things might come to a head, something sideswipes the budding romance between them. And just when you despair it might never happen, a surprise ending that you won’t see coming (and if you did, you peeked!) turns everyone’s world completely around. The characters are sexy and the writing is as tight as a pair of hot buns. And, for added measure, you just might pick up some good training tips to get your bawdy in shape for Pride.

Humphrey Bogart’s spirit stalks Ellroy’s world, though admittedly, Russell Crowe in LA Confidential is a better actor. Having enjoyed that film, I thought I’d make the foray into Ellroy’s novels. I’d heard he was a good writer, and was expecting a fine literary remake of a big cheesy genre. What I found, however, was a compendium of Hollywood clichés so bad they make you groan. The story begins in fine noire style with a sexy murder investigation fronted by Fred Underhill, a young cop with ambition and a penchant for tough guy antics in ’50s LA. Thinking he’s snagged a womanising serial killer, Fred brings his suspicions to Dudley Smith, an off-the-wall, brogue-spouting Irishman who encourages Fred’s antics. Together they take things a step too far, botching the case. Having resigned from the force in disgrace by the end of the first half, Underhill is more driven than ever to solve the murder. That’s the second half, and where it leads is to a morass of sexual psychobabble that would shame even the most amateur writer.

Given that the era wasn’t the best time to be gay, the attitude towards homosexual characters on the part of the other characters is understandable. But also given that the book was written and published in the 1980s would seem to be reason enough to subvert those silly old misconceptions, because by then the world no longer believed that all gay men were evil, sadistic, drug-addicted, child-molesting murderers. But in Ellroy’s world of junkies and dames and queer bars, they are precisely that, and no more. Besides being offensive, it’s also psychologically unconvincing and plain old dumb.

Perhaps best known as the artist who has done more then anyone else to put Queer Theatre on the map in English Canada, Gilbert is also a poet and novelist. Gentleman is his fourth novel and the most divergent in tone from his other works. It's a lyrical hybrid work, narrated in the first person by two contemporary gay New Yorkers, but based around a series of letters between Peter Pan creator JM Barrie and the adopted son who helped inspire that work. The letters suggest a sexual relationship between Barrie and the boy, culminating in the suicide of the latter at age 21. Gilbert skillfully sets up the letters to parallel the two relationships, as the mentor figure in each sets out to mold his protege both morally and culturally, while hiding behind masks of aesthetics and achievement, and each resulting in its own disastrous outcome.

It’s always fun to find a first novel that has zest and punch and a great command of style. Zoe Whittall’s first book presages what could be a long and joyous career as a novelist. (She’s already an accomplished poet.) Though it started off as a series of connected short stories, Bottle Rocket Hearts is now a fully evolved novel about an overly idealistic young lesbian named Eve living in Montreal in the heady days before the last referendum in 1995. Eve’s experiences with her best friend, Seven, an hiv-positive gay man, and the radical fem-lez Della, as well as the portrait of ’90s Montreal, make for a touching, funny and engaging story.

Too much advance billing is never a good thing. I was highly impressed by Ishiguro’s celebrated Remains of the Day and was open to reading anything by him, so grabbed this much-lauded book at a store in the Atlanta airport. I found it slow and largely undramatic, written in a highly controlled, if somewhat predictable and unexciting narrative voice. Ishiguro’s story, about a small group of children with no past who grow to adulthood in what seems to be a private boarding school, is unutterably sad and haunting. It’s a dystopian fantasy taking place not in the future, but the recent past, and seems to come so close to mirroring current scientific realities that it’s almost shocking to contemplate. I couldn’t help feeling, however, that the first person narrative by a young woman named Kathy H., who cares for her former-schoolmates in their final days, seems not to be directed at anyone or for any particular purpose, giving it a pointless, meandering feel despite the book's careful unfolding. And despite its superb moral tone and disquieting story, it was not an enjoyable read.

I’m a fairly recent fan of Le Carré’s, not having acquired a taste for thrillers and mysteries until I began writing them four years ago. While Le Carré is anything but a formulaic writer, his books are fairly consistent—smartly plotted, impeccably written, and well researched. This, his twentieth novel, is no exception, though I found a certain psychological credibility lacking on the part of his main character, a half-Irish-half-Congolese translator named Bruno. Through his work for British Intelligence, Bruno becomes involved with a secret cabal planning a coup in Africa. Somehow, despite his intelligence, he misses all the danger signs along the way. Have you never watched “MI5” or read a Le Carré novel? I kept wanting to ask, as his folly grew. Alas for Bruno, it seems he had not.

In 1944, a young Jewish boy with a parrot on his shoulder stops to pee on some railway tracks outside an old house in the South Downs of England. The boy and his parrot are saved from frying on the conductor rail only by swift action on the part of the equally old man within. The mystery of how a German-Jew got to England in the middle of the war, and the true nature of the sequences of numbers the chatty parrot spouts in German, lie at the heart of one of Chabon’s best books to date. Although never named, we soon deduce that the truculent 89-year-old is the mighty Sherlock Holmes himself, returning for one last bit of fun. This is a bon-bon on par with Curtains, Agatha Christie’s final fling with Hercule Poirot. Perfectly calibrated and with every note set to pitch perfection, it’s a stunning piece of writing—a tour de force, to use that old-fashioned phrase that has been flung willy-nilly after many an undeserving work—and with an ending of remarkable whimsy reflecting nothing more or less than the absurdity of life.

The First World War produced a good number of memorable poets (Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, and McRae, to name but a few who wrote in English), while the Second World War did not. Canadian Douglas LePan is an exception, and a notable one. It’s hard to say why his poetry is not better known, for it’s marked by exquisite grace, intelligence and outright beauty. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that LePan was a rather ordinary looking Canadian, while many of the earlier poets were exceptional looking young Englishmen who became poster boys in their time. Or perhaps it was simply because they all died during the war, while LePan lived to a ripe old 85. There’s more glory in dying young. Whatever the reason, this Governor-General’s Award winning volume, along with LePan’s last memorable work, the narrative poem Dying In The Dark, deserves to be far better known and taught for their literary and social values. During our eight-year friendship, Doug seldom spoke of the war, preferring to talk instead about literature and sex (and was equally candid about both.) These poems tell why—it was an experience one would not want to relive, except perhaps to put it down on paper to exercise one’s ghosts or else pass along the collective wisdom of those who have seen battle first-hand: no one would willingly go there. The stark visuals of these poems are at odds with their Romantic language. Many lines combine the power of Shakespeare with the beauty of Shelley and the morbidity of Keats. The symbolism of gladiators fighting with nets or swords blossoms in LePan’s hand—the hand of a master. Poems like ‘Tuscan Villa’ or ‘An Incident’ are small, exquisite masterpieces. History should be kinder to its literary cast-offs. Or perhaps Canada should.

Nava is one of the direct literary descendants of Joseph Hansen, writing stories that are intelligent, literate and predominantly gay. While his books lack Hansen’s succinctness, what I enjoy most about them are his characters—even the bad ones are vividly written. Nava's Mexican-American protagonist, Henry Rios, like Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter, is a man defined by his integrity, though fraught with human weakness and a questionable taste in men. The setting for this volume is Hollywood, and Rios’s former-partner has just died. After dating a hustler who reminds him of his ex, and who soon turns up dead himself, Rios finds himself first defending his reputation and then later battling powerful forces in Hollywood that suggest shadowy real-life parallels. ‘Does evil exist?’ Nava asks, and eventually answers, by the story’s end. And yes, there's a reason I named one of my characters in P-Town after him.

There are many reasons not to review an unfinished book, and very few reasons to review one. It’s like excavating a ruined city: you know what you’ll find is a mere suggestion of the intended whole and, in the case of a book, a ‘whole’ that existed solely in its creator’s mind. How can we judge that? Perhaps the most difficult task in examining a book like this lies in separating the myth of the writer from his final work. We approach wanting to find it great, if only to corroborate our view of Fitzgerald as a genius, if ultimately a flawed and failed one. Read More...

My respect for Hansen deepens with every volume of his Dave Brandstetter series. Brandstetter wasn’t the first openly gay protagonist in a mystery series, but in many ways he’s still the best. This, his fourth volume, deals with the murder of a publicly admired but privately hated chief of police whose record as a defender of public decency is marred by his behind-the-scenes vigilantism. Every Brandstetter tale is a watercolour of the California scene, painted to perfection, but with something malevolent hidden at its heart. By the book’s end, the watercolour has become a deftly interlocking puzzle, wherein every character has an overlapping motive for having wanted the victim dead, but it’s not till the last piece is inserted that we realize who actually had the guts to go through with it.

Of course, Hansen had a personal motive for creating the series which, in his words, was to “right some wrongs” when it came to public perception of homosexuals. But unlike many gay writers who followed, he let the message be secondary to the story, thereby ensuring the integrity of the work. That Brandstetter is also an individual of rare integrity is beside the point. Hansen was telling us what most of us know: gays are no different from anyone else when it comes to portioning out vices and virtues. No pity necessary, no applause required. If we want to be respected for what we are, he seems to be saying, it will have to be because we aren’t different, rather than because we are.

Bainbridge started off as an actor and it shows in her writing. The scenes are taut with drama—drama of the unspoken, the unexpressed, and the repressed. These themes ripple malevolently all through this tale of thwarted love and sexuality, as two spinster aunts raise their niece, 17-year-old Rita, in Liverpool during World War II, shielding her from life until an American GI comes along to rock their world.

When I last read this book I was a teenager. I was entranced by the story of the rebellious 90-year-old Hagar Shipley, who defies her son and daughter-in-law’s attempts to move her into a retirement home.  At the time, I considered it the best Canadian novel I’d read. Strange how it hasn’t held up for me, especially considering my recent re-reading of Laurence's A Bird In The House.  This time around I found Hagar’s antics childish and annoying, and the book slow and occasionally stilted.  This time around, I was on Hagar’s son’s side.

Part one of an autobiographical trilogy, the book starts off as a sort of Remembrance of Things Past for the horsy set.  The story of British orphan George Sherston’s growing to manhood and developing into an amateur athlete along the way, Sassoon published it anonymously so not to tarnish his reputation as a literary man, though the book has had a lasting popularity.

Critics may argue, but it frequently reads like a fictional account of Sassoon’s same-sex love affairs (platonic in the book, but often otherwise in real life.)  Coming not long after the Oscar Wilde scandal, it would have been unthinkable to have been forthright about such things at the time.  (Witness EM Forster’s decision not to publish Maurice in his lifetime—and alas that he lived so long.)  Sherston’s sublimated longing will be apparent mostly to the initiated, but there’s a level of emotional explicitness that shines through in the poetry (Sassoon’s and others’, for he’s fond of refashioning famous lines throughout the text.)  For instance, on being asked to stay the night at the home of a huntmaster he’s had a crush on since he was 11, the now-25-year-old Sherston shares only with his horse his great joy at what he call his ‘sublunary advancement.’  Scholars will note that this unusual word’s most famous usage is to be found in John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, where the poet speaks of ‘Dull sublunary lovers’ love’.  To disguise his love by echoing a metaphysical poet would have been the ultimate transmutation of such feelings, and Sassoon could not have been unaware of the full implications of the word.

Gay as well as being a father after a brief marriage to a woman, half-Anglo and half-Indian Jew, world famous as an English war poet but bearing the Christian name of a mythical German hero, Sassoon must surely rank as one of the most minority-strapped individuals of all time.  That his earliest ambitions were simply to fit in with the English sporting classes was likely a result of wanting to mask his multifaceted identity in a land where xenophobia and homophobia had long held sway.  That he would become one of the most celebrated poets of his day may ironically have been little more than an accident of a talent so obvious it ultimately could not disguise itself, no matter what its subject.  
Only in the last 40 pages do the memoirs take a serious turn, as Sherston finds himself on the front lines of battle in France in 1915, as did Sassoon.  Here the writing comes on full-force in one extraordinary passage after another, as Sassoon recounts the effects of war on those fighting it.  Sherston’s off-hand comments on the politics and social values of his times sound astonishingly contemporary, while the story’s devastating intimacy has an almost paralysing effect on the reader.  Some books leave you with vivid images, others with a notion of character and story arc, but very few leave you wishing you had known the author.  For me, this is one of the latter.

To be honest, I’d forgot how powerful Laurence’s writing is, having assumed over the years that my fond memories of her work were simply the result of adolescent naïveté and nationalist enthusiasm. How wrong I was! The last time I read this book of stories about a young girl’s coming of age in Depression-era Manitoba, I was 20, and thought I knew everything about good writing. I didn’t then and don’t now, but I’m glad to be able to reread it and discover that my appreciation of Laurence was not in the least misplaced. These pieces are so powerful they can take your breath away, leaving you scorched by their honesty and unrelenting pity for the terrible things life has in store for us all.

If Sylvia Plath had lived, she would write like Louise Welsh. For my money, there’s no one better writing today. This is my third reading of the book this year, and each time it yields fresh rewards. For me, The Cutting Room is up there with The Great Gatsby, The Hours and The Unvanquished. It’s a superb book, seldom equalled. As a wordsmith and craftsman, Welsh is on par with the likes of Plath, William Trevor and Ethan Mordden. As a story plotter she’s the equal of any, as evidenced by this tale of the hard-living gay auctioneer Rilke, who stumbles onto the clues to a murder in a handful of sadistic photographs at an estate sale. While it’s hard to imagine a whodunit (thriller, cosy, whatever) with such staying power, this is one. The thrill stays even when the sleuthing takes a back seat to literary interest on subsequent readings. The genius is so crackling hot you can warm your hands to it.

Not among her better books, this one comes from the mid-20s when all was frivolous and gay and Christie seems not to have taken her career overly seriously. (And why would she? She couldn’t have known yet she’d one day be crowned “Queen of Crime.”) It’s full of the sort of outrageous coincidences that mar many crime novels, and its characters are more annoying than amusing. Christie filches then-current politics in the Balkans, including the deaths of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia some 22 years earlier, and garbles country names while taking a number of xenophobic potshots at all things foreign, which seems to have been a blood sport back then. The setting and characters would be reinvented for a better book, The Seven Dials Mystery, four years later.

Although this book is a biography of Russian émigré choreographer George Balanchine, it’s also a biography of modern ballet, beginning with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and extending beyond Jerome Robbins and the legendary dances based on the work of modern compositional giants like Webern, Hindemith and Stravinsky. Author Teachout warns us at the outset that there was little interesting about Balanchine’s life, quoting him as saying it was all in the dances. He was right, though Balanchine’s life was colourful enough, having lived through the Russian Revolution before taking his troupe across Europe and eventually to acclaim in the US, where he founded the New York City Ballet. I’m not a balletomane and have seen only one Balanchine work, the famed Nutcracker Suite, a staple of New York Christmastime dance fare. It was not my cup of tea, though the friend I watched it with claimed seeing it was a thirty-year dream come true. She was enchanted; I was bored. Nostalgia waves the rules. So I might agree with Balanchine himself, who believed ballets should not be revived past their day. They are, he said, like butterflies: ‘A breath, a memory, then gone.” I might, if not for Teachout’s effervescent descriptions of his dances, which makes me wish I’d seen them when Balanchine was alive, but also makes me want to see them now.

I always approach classics with caution. They bear the weight of legends, though the reason for it isn’t always clear. Sometimes it has to do with how startling a work was in its day—the impact it had at the time—and less with how strikingly it reads now.  Sometimes the style takes considerable adjusting to before you ‘get it.’ This slim volume presents few, if any, of the problems associated with books written in other eras. Its theme, the evil that lurks beneath a civilized skin, is as relevant now as when Conrad created his narrator Marlow, who experiences darkness at the heart of Africa in his quest to find the mysterious Mr. Kurtz. Conrad’s style is compelling, highly subjective and yet largely without sentiment, while its psychology is modern and the narrative deeply layered. In other words, it’s a great book. Words have weight here. You don’t want to skim passages for factual intent at the sake of meaning. The build-up to Marlow’s long-awaited meeting with Kurtz is at times chilling and Conrad’s use of the exploration of Africa as a metaphor for the human psyche is stunningly resonant. The final few pages, in which Marlow brings Kurtz’s letters home to his bereaved fiancée, show an influence that would come to fruition nearly a quarter of a century later in The Great Gatsby (specifically, in Gatsby’s eulogy by his father to Nick Carraway, as well as Nick’s description of Daisy’s voice.) Conrad, and this book in particular, also presaged contemporary writers like J M Coetzee, as well as the much-celebrated recreation of the story in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

These poems mark a turning point, an invisible border between LePan’s old life and his new one.  Between family life, politics and teaching—all bounded by an award-winning literary career—and coming out, which he did late in life.  His metaphor, exploring the Canadian wilderness, is an apt one in the context of exploring his sexuality.  Poems like The Double and Hideout make far more sense when seen in that context, and even more so when you see such delicately sensual pieces like Song and Aubade transplanted in his next volume, the exquisite and far less oblique Far Voyages, his first full volume of gay love poems.  Read More...

I’ve never been a Hemingway fan.  His ‘greatness’ evades me.  Whenever I feel a little optimistic about him (which isn’t often), I think about reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, his much-lauded mid-career novel about an American who fights fascism in Spain.  It’s his magnum opus, I tell myself.  Plus it has that beautiful title.  And of course it was the basis for the movie that launched Ingrid Bergman’s hair.  Yet every time I attempt it I come away thinking less of Hemingway.  In truth, this is one of the most boring books ever written.  (Dare I say it’s too ‘earnest’?)  It’s stodgy and repetitive, and told largely through dialogue.  The formal translation of Spanish speech makes it cramped and unnatural.  I don’t know why earlier generations held it up as a marvel of American letters.  (Then again, I don’t know why earlier generations did a lot of things they did.)  But then I recall some of Hemingway’s earliest writing—those wonderful short stories (the collection entitled The Snows of Kilimanjaro in particular, less so In Our Time), and especially the lovely, limpid The Sun Also Rises.  OK, I think—the guy could write.  But he was no Fitzgerald!

The other ‘great’ Hemingway book I’ve always found problematic is The Old Man and the Sea.  For some reason, I always assumed that I was the problem, not the book.  The first two times I read it (I like to get to the bottom of things), it seemed to me (again) one of the most boring books ever.  The third (and the last time I will read it), it hit me.  I was in Cuba on Cayo Guillermo, near where it was written.  I was waiting for a date with a lifeguard who eventually stood me up.  I sat on that beach for more than hour, finishing the book, and suddenly it made sense.  The book was slow, the beach was slow, Cuba was slow.  It was all in the pacing.  Nothing moves there—you wait and wait and wait and nothing happens.  At least I had cracked the secret to reading The Old Man and the Sea.

While researching black history in Nova Scotia, Ward came across the story of Samuel Whit, an eleven-year-old black boy who refused to read Little Black Sambo aloud in class. As punishment, Whit was sent to a school for the developmentally handicapped and locked in a closet each day. Ward's version of the story is Through The Looking Glass all the way to Dante's Inferno, orchestrated by Theolonius Monk. Ward's style has been dubbed 'literary jazz', and rightly so. It's full of the riffs and rhythms of spontaneous invention only a master can pull off. Sadly, Ward may go down in history as one of Canada's most neglected writers along with Elizabeth Smart. Illustrated with a series of paintings by artist Jim Shirley, the book is a quiet masterpiece.

This charming novel about dysfunctional lesbian relationships happens to be one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Julie Bell runs Maid-For-You housecleaning services, but dreams of opening a sex shop. She’s not fabulous by a long shot, but she is happy with her life until she gets dumped by the beautiful Adrienne. To make things worse, Adrienne leaves Julie for her adversary, the pompous, would-be artiste Meagan. Naturally, Julie is having a hard time getting over the loss as much as the insult to her pride. The scenes float impressionistically along as Julie does her best (and worst) to shake the couple’s arriviste status in the lesbian scene, hoping against hope that Adrienne will recover her senses and return. Julie’s companions include her best friend Sarah, a suicidal cat, blind dates, and an over-the-top PC gurly-gurl named d.dee, who ride with her all the way to a surprising conclusion that is genuinely moving and totally, totally right.

This is Ondaatje’s sixth novel, and his second since the success of The English Patient. It’s also his most oblique. Anna and Claire are sisters (though Claire is adopted.) They live on a farm with their father and an enigmatic young man named Coop. All’s well until the girls’ father learns Coop is having an affair with Anna. His violent reaction destroys the family. Anna and Coop disappear, but not together. Much of the novel is recollected by Anna years afterwards. Now living in France, she is researching a long forgotten poet. Coop, meanwhile, has become a professional gambler. After a brutal run-in with a crime syndicate, Claire finds Coop and begins to nurse him back to health. Most of the remaining narrative traces the life of the poet, Lucien Segura, whom Anna has been researching.

I once took a writing class with Linda Spalding, Ondaatje’s partner. Discussing his work, she said, “Ondaatje says plot is the least important part of a novel.” (She always called him ‘Ondaatje’ in class, but ‘Michael’ when speaking of him one-on-one.) That may be an over-simplification of what he meant, but it is particularly relevant in this case. To call this a plot-less novel would not be strictly accurate on one level, but entirely true on another. The three main stories in this book intersect on a tangential level far more than in any concrete way. Simple things—a piece of glass that blinds a writer, a shard of glass Anna uses to stop her father from killing Coop—resonate in ephemeral ways, drawing and reflecting meaning. Following a traditional plot is probably the last thing Ondaatje considered.

Like WG Sebald, who used similar techniques, Ondaatje allows his stories to echo one another through the fine details of their settings as much as through a character’s actions and observations. Where Anna’s father tries to destroy her lover, Lucien observes in wonderment as his married daughter carries on an affair with a man he disapproves of. Ondaatje places that moment of discovery in a god-like setting, making the writer watch the lovers from above (which is what writers do), before removing himself so as not to remain omniscient. The key to the book lies in its title: division. Ondaatje is talking about the things that separate us as human beings, and the less tangible ones that bind. While the act of writing literally separates the writer from the subject, experiencing anything means joining the action rather than standing back and observing it.

There are moments of beautiful intimacy in this book, the kind Ondaatje is famous for, and characters that echo the broken characters in his other books. Still, Divisadero will probably frustrate anyone looking for another English Patient.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Riverhead Books 2007)

Brilliant, acerbic and filled with the love of revenge that writers are famous for: revenge for being black, being poor, being Dominican, and revenge for being smarter than the monsters who pervert the course of the world, both politically and personally. (Would that every dictator great and small could achieve such an excoriating epitaph as the DR’s Trujillo does in this book.) It’s also filled with love—just plain love. Oscar Wao is a fatboy nerd who wants to be JRR Tolkien and marry J-Lo (or the next nearest best thing.) His tale is probably far more common than we imagine, because he’s exactly the kind of person who gets noticed last, and always too late. Not this time, however, for this book plants him dead centre in the spotlight, where he belongs. A wondrous book, not brief, with an irreverence you can’t buy these days. It’s the real thing, the genuine article: inspired, comic, brilliant and moving. It’s also grateful. It pisses in the face of the world and then says ‘Thank you.’ Think Zadie Smith before she got all awards-conscious, Gabriel García-Marquez in his finest moments, Richard Pryor in some of his zaniest, and you have Oscar Wao’s life as told by Dominican émigré Díaz. Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

This is the tenth in the acclaimed series of short fiction collections focusing on the dark side of famous cities. London has earned its reputation as a noir town, having been home to both Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. As Unsworth reminds the reader in her boastful introduction, “Every kind of crime has been committed here.” And while this collection seldom reaches farther back in time than the ’70s, the London of Joe Strummer is not very different from that of Arthur Conan Doyle. Tellingly, it’s imbued with the piss and vinegar of rock’n’roll, and particularly with nostalgia for the punk era. That the first three stories are about drugs is off-putting, as though there were nothing more dangerous or inspiring to write about, but thankfully there are no vampire stories in the whole of the book. Ken Bruen’s Loaded takes us to the mean streets of Brixton in the eyes of a drug dealer who makes one mistake. It’s followed by Barry Adamson’s Maida Hell, a skillful invoking of the spirit of Maida Hill like an inverted A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Of the seventeen writers, only three are women, but they offer some of the strongest stories: Sylvie Simmons’s I Hate His Fingers is also one of the most original, while Unsworth has a good poke at sex and passion with her droll Trouble Is A Lonesome Town, and Joolz Denby’s Sic Transit Gloria Mundi gives a sly wink at the so-called greatness that is London. John Williams’s New Rose offers a picture of what some of the former-punk rockers might look like today—and it ain’t pretty—while Dan Bennett’s portrait of a troubled young man in Park Rites has all the makings of a 21^st century Ripper. A good noir collection.

By this, the third of the Dave Brandstetter mysteries, we finally have some semblance of contemporary gay life in the open. It’s 1975 and finally there are bars (and the attendant police harassment.) And of course there are boy beauty contests. But these contests are a cut above the ordinary: the beauties are actually required to have cultural knowledge, and so come under the tutelage of older gay men who groom them. Can you imagine asking a current Mr. Buns Toronto to recite something by Eliot or hum a theme from La fanciulla del West? Not likely! Perhaps it was a more idealized gay world back then. Sic transit, etc… The events here revolve around a gay bar called The Hang Ten (as in surfing, not the other.) When the bar’s owner is killed and a young hustler is discovered holding the gun, it seems like a simple open and shut case, till trusty insurance claims investigator Dave Brandstetter gets involved.

Although this is an ‘authorized biography’, it reads more like a political treatise on the state of occupied Tibet. No doubt this was part of the Dalai Lama’s reasoning behind authorizing the book as he heads into his later years after nearly a half century of exile from his homeland—more fuel for a fire threatened with extinction on his death. The few solid glimpses of Tibet’s spiritual head are welcome, but they’re no more revealing than much of the other material by and about him. If His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama comes across as god-like, it’s more through his lack of everyday human foibles than anything else. There’s little that’s magic here, but then the writer’s introduction seems almost an apology for his interest in a religion whose main credo is reincarnation. That’s expected from a leftist humanist viewpoint that looks to the human intellect as the highest creative force in the universe—a vast mistake, as our current world state shows. If more people cared about the Dalai Lama’s teaching and less about China-occupied Tibet, we might solve a good deal more of our sorry problems.

The William Powell and Myrna Loy Murder Case by George Baxt (St. Martin’s Press 1996)

This is the 11^th of 13 books in Baxt’s series of fictional murder cases in which real life celebrities help solve crimes. Metro stars Myrna Loy and William Powell, fresh from their box-office success in The Thin Man, team up between scripts to unravel a murder plot involving a Hollywood madame who provides sexual playmates for celebrities, but then threatens to reveal her clients’ identities. Both the mystery and comedic materials are stretched pretty thin in this one, and neither Loy nor Powell carry enough weight as celebrities today to render them irresistible. For me, Baxt’s books are hit or miss. And while this one’s a far cry from his nearly impenetrable Noel Coward Murder Case, it’s nowhere near the truly hilarious case featuring a raunchy, outspoken Tallulah Bankhead.

Virtually ignored during his lifetime, West became a cult figure after his early death in 1940. It’s hard to say where his reputation lies now, though he still shows up on Best 100 Novels lists. F. Scott Fitzgerald considered himself a fan. Locust, the last of four short novels, is considered West’s most mature work. Think Fitzgerald writing Barton Fink or the Coen Brothers directing The Last Tycoon and you’ll come close to understanding West’s vision. It has a surprisingly contemporary feel, with a truly cynical wink at life in Hollywood that didn’t come into vogue for decades (back then it was all about covering up scandals, not using them for literary fodder.) There’s no moral core to West’s world, hardly even a center at all, populated as it is by hucksters and star-struck dreamers who amount to little more than a plague of locusts. At first glance it seems a far cry from Fitzgerald’s moral and romantic, if ultimately tragic, universe, but it’s actually its inverse. If you took the characters from the party scenes in The Great Gatsby and made the doomed, trashy Myrtle Wilson a romantic focus (with Nick Carraway and George Wilson as rival-protagonists), you’d have something like this bleakly comic novel by Nathanael West.

Apart from the fact that Hansen’s early Brandstetter novels are impeccably plotted, it’s refreshing to see a gay man portrayed so accurately and casually long before Gay became associated with anything like Pride. To read this book, you might think gay couples were nothing startling in the early-70s. Hansen is just as sensitive in his portrayals of visible minorities (making them both realistic and visible.) His outlook seems to have more in common with contemporary standards than whatever ‘moral’ view was in operation in the decade that produced the Moral Majority and Anita Bryant. Smart, inventive and well-paced, Hansen’s books clearly stand the test of time.
 

This was one of the last great Cold War novels in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR, when a whole genre of thriller seemed like it would fall by the wayside. With its heavy noir atmosphere, London street cred, and intimate glimpses into the machinations of the British spy network, Shadow Play has its roots in books like LeCarré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Milne is a master of deceit, unlike his unlikely protagonist, the one-footed private eye Jimmy Jenner, who can scarcely figure out the motives of those around him, beginning with long-time friend and fellow former-police officer, Peter Moody. The story starts when Jenner shows up at Moody’s apartment and discovers what looks like a murder—only he smells a set-up. The discovery triggers a whole range of betrayals and counter-betrayals. Clever and cunning.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?

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 6^th 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.

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.

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 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 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.