The Best of the New Gay Books
Posted by: Nick DiMartino
I’ve got two book reviews due in the next four days, and I’ll be lucky to finish one of them. Besides which, I’ve got one month left to put together the list of the six books we’ll be reading for the second half of 2009 in the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club. There’s a teetering pile right next to my armchair. Beside the other pile of international novels I’m supposed to be reviewing.
Maybe I can combine these two tasks. Maybe I can even write a blog about it.
Every international title I’ve read this month for reviewing has disappointed me. Achy Obejas novel of Cuba, Ruins, didn’t leave me with much. Juan de Recacoechea’s Bolivian novel, Andean Express, has way too big a cast of characters for the slight thing it is. Santiago Roncagliolo’s intense political novel from Peru, Red April, has a hero that suddenly, inexplicably forty pages from the end of the novel rapes his girlfriend. And Into the Beautiful North, the new novel by Luis Alberto Urrea, author of the super-realistic The Devil’s Highway, has a set-up like a silly fairy tale and is utterly unbelievable. And when I branched out, convincing my editor that everyone knew someone suffering from addiction and that I should review Michael Stein’s new The Addict – well, it’s a fascinating topic and a fascinating doctor, but the woman who’s his addicted patient is something of a sad zero who’s taken a ten-year vacation from her life and it shows.
Meanwhile gay books are piling up, waiting to be considered for the club. Maybe I ought to consider reviewing them, for a change. Someone should.
There isn’t time for all of them. What’s at the top of the pile? Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox. A mischievous boy in a bathtub on the cover – probably why it’s on top. The attractive author is a former porn star, and the first page is very clever. Then it settles into a self-absorbed, self-congratulatory style which may be the accurate language of beautiful people in the fast lane, but for those of us outside that world of physical privilege, it rings as bullshit. Yike, did I say that? The confidence of a young man that he can have anyone he wants is not the most endearing character trait. My jealousy of him quickly turns to annoyance. His conviction that everyone thinks he’s hot soon crippled my hand from turning any more pages.
Next I picked up the book that Beacon Press has kindly given our club a number of advances, Terry Galloway’s Mean Little Deaf Queer. At our last meeting, I rattled off little mini-sells on my top twelve choices for the second half of 2009, and then asked the members to vote. This was the top choice, probably since three of the women had already read it. I’ll come back to this one. I don’t connect with it completely, but it’s straightforward in style and covers an area of interest.
That’s when I got Amanda’s email. One of our club members had taken home an advance and liked it well enough to recommend it to me. And fate then conveniently dropped in my path another advance. I’m talking about Ivan E. Coyote’s The Slow Fix. Ivan is a girl who looks like a dang cute boy, and she writes super-short stories of four pages that are comic and heartfelt. I don’t always get them. I didn’t get the title story. They strike me like oral performance pieces.
Which brings me to the book I started last and liked best, a title recommended to me by Adrienne, a reader of this blog, My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy by Andrea Askowitz. I like it at once. This is the one for me. It’s human and vulnerable and she’s got a way with words. Unfortunately, it’s been published for a month, and my editor likes them a month in advance, but it’s put out by a little publishing house called Cleis Press and we love helping little publishers so my editor might make an exception, and there’s something so universal about this one that I’m thinking – this may be the perfect crossover book for straight book clubs, as well.
April 4th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Nick, I know that your book group is focused on Gay & Lesbian titles, but there are more transgender stories comming out these days that might also be worthy. There are, of course, some great teen novels, like “Luna.” But “Like Son” by Felicia Luna Lemus, who wrote “Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties,” looks good–haven’t read it yet, but just put it in my “coming-of-age” display!