finished up dancer from the dance over the weekend, and despite having enjoyed much of the first two-hundred pages, found myself struggling to get through the last fifty. following is a series of the ups and downs which colored my reading experience.
up – elegantly crafted language: nothing kills my impression of a writer’s writing than inexpertly crafted or strangely awkward metaphors or similes. often times it will seem like an author felt obliged to offer some kind of literary comparison at the end of each paragraph, even if they were unable to think of a fit.
as an example, in the book i just started reading, the author offers up this great image of his father as a flowing river, and his mother as a mountain around which the river had to suddenly change its course.
and though you might think that, given enough time, the stream will move the hill, or cut it through, it’s the stream that will twist in its bed, alter its course. the new comes to feel natural. detour becomes destiny.
why then, he chooses to follow it up with
it was his nature, and he wore it with dignity, like a childhood hat one has long outgrown but can’t remove for the rest of his life.
is beyond me. a hat he can’t remove for the rest of his life? is there some place in the world where this image actually makes sense?
thankfully holleran avoids these snafus, using language which is (at least to me) entirely apt. APT! his overall use of language, i found, to be the most enjoyable of any of the other lgbt writers i’ve read.
down – who is narrating this? i spent a great deal of the book pondering exactly who the narrator was, and how he managed to gain access to all this information. there’s something very jiminy cricket-esque about him, as he manages to always be present for poignant moments or telling conversations, while being entirely irrelevant to the scene. most times he just happens to pass on the street and overhear something, while in later scenes he just happens to be hired as staff for a party and is clearing tables when conversations are occuring. strangely, after spending the entire book as a passerby and non participant, one of the main characters chooses to say his last words to him. in the epilogue i was waiting for some revelation about who the narrator was (ie. that it was actually the protagonist, or one of the supporting characters who was profoudly affected by him) but there was no such reveal. he is, apparently, just some guy.
up – that’s so meta! the book opens with a series of letters written back and forth between two friends. the novel itself is intended to be a book written by one of the letter-writers about a pair of friends with whom both of the letter-writers were acquainted and by whom both were profoundly affected. somewhere in the middle of the book, the narrrator comments upon one of their friends who is a novelist and constantly asks the protagonist questions about his life as a rentboy as research for the novel he is working on. i’m more amused that i was prompted to think to myself “that’s so meta!” rather than it actually being so, since i’ve been much confounded by the concept of meta, and rarely find cases where i can correctly identify it.
down – wait, who died? the set up of the novel presents us with the narrator returning to a deceased friend’s home to collect his belongings. then he returns us to the beginning, at which point we are introduced to said friend, still alive, and many others, all living it up in new york in the gay gay gay 70s. at about the 200 of 250 page mark, someone dies, but it was totally not the person i thought died. then it’s like, wait, did that original person even die at all?
it could very well be that i have the reading comprehension of a first grader, (the reading portions of standardized tests were always easily my lowest score.) but i swear there was something misleading about the set up and the epilogue. i felt so perplexed by this that after re-reading the first chapter, i read the last 50 pages rather distractedly.
up? down? – uber-literate/promiscuous gay people were gay people in the 70s really all that and a bag of chips, because i don’t know anyone nowadays that can dance until 6am every night, do boatloads of drugs, have all kinds of promiscuous sex and still be in shape, stunningly attractive, packing large AND speak about their current situations with allusions to greek mythology and classic literature. (um, temple of priapus, anyone?)
it seems like a lot of the gay lit i read has a preoccupation with the outward perfection of their protagonists. of course, this is often an indication of a later revealed inner flaw, but nonetheless, the depictions of gay men as some kind of superhuman drug/sex/literature/culture machine strikes me as self-indulgent to an extent. maybe i only feel this way because i myself cannot stay up past 12:30 anymore, and allusions to my life are mostly made through episodes of star trek: the next generation, the simpsons, and america’s next top model.
overall, a good read, certainly better than the majority of lgbt lit i’ve read. in fact, i have to wonder why lgbt studies subjected me to john rechy (twice!) and yet this book was never assigned.
