The Carnivorous Lamb

by Agustin Gomez-Arcos

this bizarre novel is for advanced readers only. apparently The Carnivorous Lamb is an extended metaphor for life in Spain under Franco as well as a scathing indictment of both fascism and catholicism. makes sense. but the critiques and political commentary didn't seem metaphorical or ambiguous to me - the various analyses of religion and government are right there on every page. they are interwoven with all of the romantic, overheated, pervy details of an incestuous brotherly relationship unfolding over time. it's almost like Fassbinder in his Querelle phase (or maybe earlier - his Lola phase?) decided to sit down and write a novel. it is sickening and fascinating and really smart, all at once. the often langorous, decadent perspective of the narrator only helps to make the journey all the more disturbing. Story of the Queer Eye! indeed.


the characterizations are severely limited by the metaphor; the narrative is rambling; the politics are less-than-subtle; the relentlessly pithy commentary is at times unbearable; there is often a kind of staginess to the dialogue (perhaps due to the translation). but those weaknesses seem so thin when looking at the beauty of much of the language, the deadpan irony of the observations, the sheer aggressiveness of the various political points being made... and just the uniqueness of the entire effort overall. it is a pointed, aggravatingly stylized, swooningly pornographic, highly intelligent, vindictive little literary conceit.

i suppose this novel is, inevitably, considered to be a member of the genre Queer Fiction; it has as much in common with the many often lightweight examples of that genre as the works of Burroughs.

The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

i picked this up in a hostel donation shelf in amsterdam; it was missing both the back and front covers and the author was unknown to me. i knew nothing about it except that it was something to pass the time reading while high, as my traveling partner slowly regained her health. i think it was the best circumstances in which to read the book; its mysteries and dreamlike meanderings completely free from descriptive and contextual blurb, all explication left entirely to my own impressions. something about the sometimes languorous, sometimes precise writing style and the lingering sense of mysterious motivations barely expressed by the characters was so reminscent of the polite dutch people around me, in their city full of strangeness and charm. reading the movement of the protagonist through periods as an australian jackaroo, a brothel's madame, a soldier in world war 2 france, a transvestite... it felt at first like trying to figure out the narrative of a dream, until slowly, with no great defining moment, everything made perfect and tragic sense. it was a move from a description of a dream into the dream itself. by the end of the novel i felt as if i had looked through the author's eyes and thought the author's thoughts.

in the end, what is the meaning? well, as with all great books, there are many avenues to finding meaning and many sorts of meanings on display, many "points" that can be found and many that are being made, consciously and perhaps otherwise. identity and its potential fluidity. self-affirmation. class and social conventions. masculine & feminine archetypes. an ode to landscapes, both country and city. bourgeoisie vs. bohemia. the peace that some find in war, the war that exists during peace. lots of things. if i had to chose one of the above, i'd say the first: Identity. what is it, anyway?

now a warning: this is dense, dizzying, poetic prose. challenging. think Peake, Pynchon, Paul Scott, etc... he's quite different from those authors but they all share an occasional sort of impenetrability in the writing. well, at least superficially impenetrable - the opposite of a quick and shallow read. wonderful stuff, gorgeous and memorable prose, but not for everyone i suppose.

according to australians i met during the trip, apparently Patrick White's novels are required reading back home, but the kind that few australians ever actually get around to reading. a strange fate for the only australian nobel prize winner for literature! to be known yet unknown - so much like the protagonist of his fascinating novel.

Horse Crazy

by Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana is a wise and well-respected art critic. a photo of him will show a man who looks really gnomish, wizened well beyond his years, an almost malnourished version of Truman Capote. he is not even remotely a traditionally handsome guy. i say this not to be critical or demeaning; my point is that this is a man who has experienced difference his entire life - so i hoped his perspective would be informed by perhaps something of an outsider mentality. and this lack - combined with the knowledge that he is presumably an intelligent and discerning art critic - is exactly why the rote, annoying Horse Crazy was such a disappointment. Indiana tackles a story and a theme that is so familiar that it becomes inescapably dull and predictable and trite. it is like every other gay or non-gay novel in which an older guy chases after the skirts of some pretty young thing who ends up being a femme or homme fatale, a moral black hole. the eternal - and eternally predictable - pursuit of physical perfection. this is especially aggravating when considering who the author is and what he has probably experienced in his life - physical appearance does create 'outsider status', particularly in Gay World. so why did he play into this paradigm instead of reacting against it or even subverting it? was he aiming for marketable blandness and the standardized depiction of beauty in order to achieve... well, what exactly did he mean to achieve?

the writing is not at all bad. quite dry, quite sardonic. it is, unfortunately, the underlying ideas that are mediocre. there does not appear to be an awareness that a cliche is being trotted out, repeated in yet another book, per usual.

anyway, the novel itself. it is about a photographer obsessed with a manipulative waiter (and a former heroin addict - thus the lame title). the waiter is, of course, oh such a handsome errant prince with such a great, junkie-chic body. the photographer is, of course, all too easily strung along and taken advantage of. YAWN. the only reason this rises above 1-star material is that i had a lot of amusement when our protagonist reacts to finding his love-of-a-lifetime selling whatnot on a nyc sidewalk. his dawning realization that he is obsessed with someone who is not just a hustler, but also sort of a tacky bozo... priceless! suddenly he finds him to be not-so-cute. ha, ha - joke's on you, bougie sucker!

Indiana went on to deliver a postmodern trilogy based on famous modern crimes (among them, andrew cunanan's murder of versace and the menendez brothers' parental slayfest). i wonder if they are more interesting.

The Flesh Fables

by Aaron Travis

hard to believe that these stories were published in various erotic magazines in the 80s. they push boundaries that i didn't even realize existed. at this point i don't even know what i'm going to say about this collection. except that i will probably have nightmares tonight about vindictive sex torture, transformative (literally) sex torture, gray area but basically good-time quasi-sex torture that still made me feel like i needed to shower off a creepy feeling of wrongness; exploited and abused teens & adults, delicate coming of age reminiscences; Michel Foucault, Ancient Rome, Clive Barker, Louisiana, John Preston; buried self-loathing made sexy (i suppose) in a handsome trucker, anti-americanism paving the way to the torture and sexual destruction of an american abroad - many, many years before Hostel & Turistas; blue light is terrifying, kudzu is terrifying, southern cops are terrifying, the Turks are terrifying; a game of cards; piss, semen, and big dicks; public humiliation in diners, the leather world, secret polaroids and disturbing paperbacks, a road trip, a trip to Italy, a mind-trip; things that are hot, things that are intellectually fascinating, things that are so appalling that they sorta make me die inside a little bit. oh and a headless torso that is watching itself as it is sexually wrung out and then literally de-sexed (not castrated: de-sexed). the writing is way beyond what i expected. highly intelligent. atmospheric. Dennis Cooper minus the wimpy blankness & collegiate postmodernism. De Sade & Bret Easton Ellis & Jim Thompson & Poppy Brite all got together and had a baby named The Flesh Fables. acclaimed historical author Steven Saylor writing pseudonymously as villainous pornographer Aaron Travis. surprisingly serious and seriously sadistic, with a few uncomfortably light touches to close out all the tortuous intensity. extremely challenging, in a good way... but also in a way that made me feel sick to my stomach and sorta hollow, sorta mentally & emotionally & morally cored out. Travis mines the unconscious like oil drillers rape the land - sometimes with a lot more subtlety but always with an ample amount of crude brutality. should erotic fiction have the cumulative effect of making you feel like a bad person? this collection, summed up in a word: memorable!

but oh, this cover, ugh:

A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

Edmund White portrays his younger life in a narcotic and poetic style. not exactly the most flattering self-portrait... the protagonist's travails are emotionally affecting yet he remains creepily distanced from the events and people in his own life - in particular from his equally creepy, distant, self-absorbed father. the apple does not fall far from the tree, i suppose. overall, the language is some of the most beautiful, in my experience, of all of gay fiction - rivaling even Giovanni's Room. the prose is sometimes so gorgeous it becomes hypnotic. the man certainly knows how to write!

the episodic nature of the book - in some ways disguised by the circular narrative - is rich with at times dreamy, other times cruelly crystal clear recountings of key moments in this boy's life. i was so impressed by this one that i've forced a couple friends (straight ones) to give it a go. unfortunately, they both found the narrator to be, well... "poisonous" would be an accurate word, although i'm sure stronger, angrier words were used. i suppose i can see that. but the narrator is a character of depth, full of wry introspection and canny circumspection. he lives in a marvelously layered and mysterious world, one where he often turns out to be more predator than prey. the whole thing flows together in a way that is impressively cohesive and memorable. a very individualistic achievement in the Gay Coming of Age subgenre.

plus i've never read a more sinister depiction of a blowjob in my life!

The Swimming-Pool Library

by Alan Hollinghurst

i'll start off with a blanket statement: many novels of the Gay Fiction subgenre will fall within two categories.

1. Coming of Age Tales in which the protagonist struggles to come out, often against his unsympathetic surroundings. often tender; occasionally mawkish.

2. a category that i like to call Gay World Novels in which, oh, everyone is pretty much gay. fine. dream on, gays, dream on. if you can't live it...dream it!

to me, the self-relegation of most gay novels between these two categories can be annoying, but i suppose understandable. gays have to come out of the closet and so this intense experience is perfectly paired with the classic coming-of-age tale's structure. and gays are also often rejected by straight society, so why not rejoice in the telling of tales that in turn reject that straight world, that rolls its eyes at it, that have narratives that seem to posit that straights are the actual minority? Swimming-Pool falls squarely within that second category.

the novel is about a repulsive and useless parasite, a shallow and superficial upper-class twit obsessed solely with sex, entirely without any qualities whatsoever except, i suppose, his aristocratic lineage and his apparently smashing good looks and large endowment. unfortunately, the protagonist somehow thinks that he's not a complete waste of space. even more unfortunately, the author seems to think that he's not so bad, that his thoughts and interests and obsessions and general behavior are not completely infantile and boring. well, i beg to differ, hollinghurst!

this is a book of so many wasted opportunities that it becomes truly disgusting. the writer knows how to write: his style is elegant and subtle and full of long, brave sentences and carefully drawn mysteries and surprisingly ambiguous characterization. and he throws it all away by writing about a world THAT CARES ABOUT NOTHING EXCEPT FOR SEX. give me a fucking break, hollinghurst! is this how you see gay people? do they think of nothing but checking people out, eyeing the package of every single dude that crosses their path, rating each body, ignoring all women, living for moments that are only about the interwining of bodies, the randomly chosen hook-up, the spilling of various fluids? do they not have other thoughts, have they no other interests, no other inner or outer life? do their interior monologues consist of nothing but the drooling study of the beauty of the male form? are they incapable of even the slightest depth? do all gays live to celebrate the flesh, and for nothing else whatsoever? when our narrator greets his long-lost lover by ripping his pants down and burying his face in his ass, is this supposed to be palpably romantic rather than absurd and farcical?

the novel wastes a golden opportunity in the story of the elderly and very gay Lord Nantwich, whose diaries the protagonist is working his way through as he considers writing a bio of the lord's life. learning about this elderly gent's story could have been fascinating - a tale of england's colonial past, adventures in africa, a recounting of london during some very interesting times, all seen through the lense of an upper class gay outsider. but 'tis not to be. like the narrator of the present, Lord Nantwich is magically surrounded by gay acquaintances and probably-gay-or-maybe-bisexual african natives. almost every single person that either character meets, past or present, is gay or probably-gay-or-bisexual. and even worse, and much like the narrator of the present, Lord Nantwich is also disinterested in recounting anything whatsoever that isn't about getting off and ogling all the gay chaps around him. such a potentially vivid life and all he is primarily interested in is getting some action? both characters are resoundingly pathetic - and yet hollinghurst appears to think there is something brave about Lord Nantwich and something charming about our feckless, pointless narrator. at one point, the protagonist idly thumbs through his best friend's diary. naturally, his best friend is also obsessed with sex. i guess that's how gays are, right? they simply have no other interests.

there was one thing that consistently amused me, in a good way: the effete and fatuous queen of a lead character is also a rough, tough top. i like that! it is always interesting when expectations and stereotypes are subverted. sadly, those instances are the only examples of any kind of subversiveness.

a part of the novel that struck me as particularly foul was the sexualization of kids. yes, kids can be sexual, i know this of course. but almost an entire chapter devoted to salivating over a junior boxing championship? a short sequence where the narrator describes a family man lovingly patting his child while also lovingly caressing his own hard-on - described as some kind of deep connection...seriously, hollinghurst?

the title is laughable. the narrator's constant presence at the local english equivalent of the ymca swimming pool is metaphorically (?) tied to his dreamy past hooking up with guys in the school swimming pool, both of which are thematically (?) linked up with Lord Nantwich's rather more hedonistic private pool. that is some serious over-reaching there, hollinghurst.

the novel has a deeply creepy obsession with race. specifically, blacks. Lord Nantwich is obsessed by them, both africans and african-american soldiers he meets. this is presented with some slight critical distance, but you know what? "slight critical distance" is not enough when the attitude being presented is so barkingly colonial and condescending that it becomes downright repulsive. our charmless hero also starts out with a black boyfriend and much is made of that character's stereotypical, lower-class 'blackness' and, naturally, his dangerous life in the projects. that's how blacks are, right? they are either innocent, wide-eyed africans or sexy, violent thugs. and of course the best friend also has his own love of black men - well, their dicks, that is. reading all about an insufferable, body-worshipping twit of a protagonist and an elderly upper-class jackass who lives to objectify eventually made me want to commit some bodily harm on both of them. when the narrator eventually gets his ass kicked, i couldn't help but think well finally he is getting a dose of some sort of reality that has nothing to do with worship of the male body or getting fucked.

my gosh, i just hated this novel.

a little self-disclosure here. i'm a bi guy. i was out to a select group in high school. i was out to the world in college. i helped start the second iteration of Act-Up San Diego. when i was younger and better looking, i whored myself out a bit (now there's a fun fact). i used to volunteer for gay men dying of hiv. now i work for an agency whose clientele is well over half gay. i've gone to jail protesting for the right of gay marriage and the rights of gay teachers to teach children. i think my queer credibility is pretty much impeccable. and i say all this, not just to provide personal context, but mainly because i do not want this review to give the impression that there is any kind of lurking, bottled-up self-hate or any negative attitude towards gay sexuality involved in my rejection of this appalling novel. although i am not a big part of the gay community, i celebrate it and of course am a proud member.

but there is nothing to celebrate about this novel. it was a revolting, depressing, infuriating experience for me. apparently The Swimming-Pool Library is considered to be some kind of modern gay classic. that does a profound disservice to the genuinely complex and challenging works and the truly sensitive and moving narratives that exist in this often wonderful subgenre.

Nightwood

by Djuna Barnes



Nightwood is the sound of hearts breaking, written on the page, spread out for all to see, five lives, five people eviscerated and eviscerating each other. These people fucking kill me, they are so sad and so full of nonsense and so determined to live in their own personal little boxes, striving for epiphanies that they barely even understand, trying to be a certain idea of What a Person Is. Is that what I'm like? Maybe that's what everyone is like. Barnes lays out these characters' lives like beads on a string, one after the other. "Baron" Felix, that whole fake heritage made by his father that he now lives out as if it were real. I can't help but identify a little bit with the Baron, his bullshit, his need to please, to be calm and careful as a way to prop himself up. His stiffness. Not really sure how Barnes feels about him - she spends a lot of time with him, such an elaborate backstory, so that's something (although I hate all the derogatory Jew crap, 'Jews are like this, Jews always think this way' - bogus, and the only thing that is boring in Nightwood). She creates this hollow man and then she fills him up with life and sadness and a rigid sort of sweetness towards his son, I see myself in him, and other people I know, my dad especially. Barnes seems more interested in the Robin-Nora-Jenny triangle. Makes sense; I'm more interested in them too. Robin Vote. That name! Is it supposed to mean something? She is like something out of a Duras novel, a hollow vessel, an intellectual kind of id, a sick need to define herself by rejecting those who want her, rejecting those who want to define her. I see a lot of myself in Robin, that fucked up need to keep people at a distance, no real connection means no proprietary relationship, let's just be friends, friends are easy, I love my friends. Except Robin has no real love in her, just a blind, mindless need... for what? Something. When we first meet her she is passed out, insensible; Barnes describes her as "La Somnambule", a sleepwalker in life - except sleepwalkers don't destroy. She is more like an exterminating angel, a sleepy one. In the end, confronting a dog, she is transformed into a kind of dog herself. I think that's unfair to dogs. My sympathies are mainly with Nora Flood, a tough dyke of the old school, a listener, a person people gravitate towards, to tell their stories, to be listened to and so given a kind of identity by that listening, being made human by being seen as human by another human. I see a lot of myself in Nora. There is a remoteness to her, different than the alien quality of Robin's hollow vessel, more like a stillness, a need to stay still and understand and truly see the world around her. And then when she's hurt, when she is filled with longing and damage and pain, it is so debilitating and yet filled with such sad fury, a painful howling fury, I've felt that, it just takes over and you don't want to feel anything but pain, your mind is just blank with it, all bright and dark hues of hot angry red. Poor Nora. Why does her life become defined by her pursuit of Robin? That's not even a life. But it is a better life than Jenny Petheridge's life, the third part of this strange, sorrowful triangle. Triangle? Why do I keep saying that? If you include Baron Felix, it is more of a square. But he barely counts in their lives, his poor sad son becomes his life, a son who is all need and reaching towards some kind of meaning, something to define him. I felt such empathy for that son, like I was that son. I am that son. But back to Jenny. Djuna Barnes must have based Jenny on someone she hates. There is so much detail about her craziness. And a lot of it is so funny, a terrible kind of funny, laughing at someone who is a rich basket case, at a person who is basically a straw man - woman - for the author's hate. She is all gruesome softness and blind stabby moments, crying hysterics and desperate neediness, such intensity and so little affect, defining herself by creating these fake worlds to live in, this dramatic love affair with an empty vessel, not caring who she hurts - shoving, scratching her emotions right into, onto a person's face, literally. And those who love her die - her history of dead husbands, leaving her better off and with more of nothing. I can't help but identify with Jenny, with her weakness, her desperate yearning. I remember when my heart was broken, except I was the one who did the breaking, broke two hearts, another person's heart isn't enough, let's break mine too, like Jenny with her insensible angry intrusive neediness, her boring self-abnegating self-flagellations, I hate all that. How can a person like Jenny compete with a person like Nora, how can Robin chose possession over true understanding? Well, that happens all the time I suppose. And Robin doesn't really even choose her, she chooses herself, again and again. I get Robin, I see her in the mirror; she's coming and going from and to nowhere.

And then the renegade doctor, the berserk socialite, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, railing against form and tradition, gentle and strong and angry and petty, a drunkard, a man who loves life, a transvestite living in his little squalid apartment, a man full of warmth and kindness and vitriol, a man who secretly defines himself by helping others, spitting out monologues about life and death and appearance and sanctity and desire. He delivered Nora Flood into the world and is her sounding-board, his long rants are not just violent flows of sound and fury and pathos, they are not merely self-absorbed, they are trying to speak to her by speaking of himself, he is trying to break through to her by breaking himself down in front of her, shaking her back to life, away from insensibility and morbid obsession, until the rant turns on the ranter and he in turn is broken down, seeing himself and the world around him for what he and it truly is, is becoming, is falling back into. His delirious rants are like the novel itself, discretely separated into chapters, separated by character and incident, and yet the parts are flowing into each other, the language flows into reality and out of it, the narrative folds up into itself until it becomes unrecognizable as a narrative, like a flower all mashed up so that the pulp is barely recognizable as the original flower, just little parts here and there, you pull a piece out and it is still a flower but what connection does it have to the original thing? It turns in on itself, it becomes something different and it stays essentially the same. I see a lot of myself in Matthew O'Connor, him most of all, most of all, I Am Matthew O'Connor, I live and breathe him, I read about these breaking hearts and they are all my heart too, all of it, none of it, it all comes together, it's all the same, each separate one of them, right?

...Is this a mobius strip, of sorts?:



_________________________

looking back on this a few weeks later, i see that i neglected key things that i usually like to put in my reviews.

the writing itself: beautiful! hypnotic. excessive. idiosyncratic. modernist (duh). drily amusing. rich with off-kilter nuance. flows like a bad dream.

the characterization: despite the experimental nature of the novel and a regular use of caricature, these are some amazingly three-dimensional characters. i got to understand them on a really human level, and not just as quirky conceits on a page.

the narrative: broken, unstable, constantly challenging - and often very annoying as well. annoying like sand in an oyster's shell! Nightwood: a pearl.