I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter
No, I don't go south in the winter, though I have plans for that. But I do read a lot, and on this page I will post some brief descriptions of books that I have enjoyed and a few that I haven't liked. You should be able to find them all at Amazon.
At the bottom of the page, there are links to some other books that I have reviewed in my Journal.
The Dreyfus affair, by Peter Lefcourt.
No apologies for starting with this one. For a start, I think it is the funniest book I ever read. I can only read a few pages at a time, because my eyes fill with tears of laughter. Also, the theme of the book is very relevant to these pages. It is the story of Randy Dreyfus, who plays shortstop for a major league baseball team. He seems to have everything he could wish for – a seven-figure salary, married to a beautiful model, twin daughters, and he is in line for the season's MVP award and a place in the Hall of Fame. But as the story starts, he realises that he is falling helplessly in love with his second baseman. From there, things go downhill fast.
Sample extract (the scene is a press conference after Randy and D.J. have turned a double play and scored the winning run in a key Championship game):
... Randy laughed. And he continued to laugh as the cameras clicked. He and D.J. put their arms around each other and hugged. The emotion of victory. The standard locker-room embrace of the winners, the heroes.
The picture was on every sports page of every paper in the country the following morning. The country reveled in their two young gods. They celebrated this vision of American manhood at its finest until another picture appeared the next day.
This picture was also of Randy Dreyfus and D.J. Pickett embracing. But this time they had their tongues down each other's throats.
The Border Trilogy, by Cormac McCarthy.
There is no gay content here. I just think that Cormac McCarthy is the best living writer of English. His novels have an incredible power and intensity. The first two volumes of The Border Trilogy are both coming-of-age stories about teenage boys in the desert country of the American Southwest and Mexico some time around 1940. McCarthy's prose may sometimes seem a bit over the top, but he has an extraordinary ability to find words for thoughts and emotions that are beyond words. Here is an extract from the first volume of the trilogy, All the Pretty Horses, where young John Grady Cole reacts to the death of a doe that he has had to shoot for its meat:
When he reached her she lay in her blood in the grass and he knelt with the rifle and put his hand on her neck and she looked at him and her eyes were warm and wet and there was no fear in them and then she died. He sat watching her for a long time. [...] he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
I read that All the Pretty Horses is being made into a movie, with Matt Damon in the lead. Should be good, though I cannot see how any movie could begin to match the strength and depth of McCarthy's writing.
McCarthy has an uncanny ear for dialogue. Here is a single line from The Border Trilogy's second volume, The Crossing. Sixteen-year-old Billy Parham's younger brother Boyd is responding to some crazy suggestion that Billy has made:
Everthing you can do it dont mean it's a good idea, said Boyd.
I defy you to read that line without hearing it said in a laconic Texan drawl. In just a few words McCarthy creates a whole character.
In the final volume of the trilogy, Cities of the Plain, the main characters from the two previous volumes, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, have met up as cowboys working on a New Mexico ranch. Billy is in his early twenties, John is still a teenager, and to Billy he is a replacement for his dead brother Boyd. If All the Pretty Horses is about a boy's love for horses and The Crossing is about a boy's love for a wolf, then Cities of the Plain is about a boy's love for a girl, though the girl herself, imprisoned by a pimp in a Mexican whorehouse, only figures occasionally in the story. In all three volumes of the trilogy, Mexico symbolises everything that is wild, alluring, dangerous and unattainable. Cities of the Plain is one of McCarthy's bleakest novels, and the knife fight towards the end is the scariest piece of descriptive writing that I know of. Don't look for a happy ending.
As well as having an amazing ear for dialogue, McCarthy is a natural storyteller. Most of his anecdotes are too long to quote, but here is one from Cities of the Plain that is worth repeating in full, as told by Billy's friend Troy.
A jackrabbit froze in the road. Its red eye shone.
Go on dumb-ass, Billy said.
The rabbit made a soft thud under the truck. Troy took the lighter from the dashboard and lit his cigarette with it and put the lighter back in the receptacle.
When I got out of the army I went up to Amarillo with Gene Edmonds for the rodeo and stock show. He'd fixed us up with dates and all. We was supposed to be at their house to pick em up at ten oclock in the mornin and it was after midnight fore we left out of El Paso. Gene had a brand new Olds Eighty-eight and he pitched me the keys and told me to drive. Quick as we hit highway eighty he looked over at me, told me to shower down on it. That thing would strictly motivate. I pushed it up to about eighty, eighty-five. Still had about a yard of pedal left. He looked over again. I said: How fast do you want to go? He said just whatever you feel comfortable with. Hell. I didnt do nothin but roll her on up to about a hundred and ten and here we went. Old long flat road. Had about six hundred miles of it in front of us.
Well there was all these jackrabbits in the road. They'd set there and freeze in the lights. Blap. Blap. I looked over at Gene and I said: What do you want to do about these rabbits? He looked at me and he said: Rabbits? I mean if you were lookin for somebody to give a shit I can tell you right now it sure as hell wasnt Gene. He didnt care if syrup went to thirty cents a sop.
We pulled into a filling station at Dimmitt Texas just about daybreak. Pulled up to the pumps and shut her down and set there and there was a car on the other side of the pumps and the old boy that worked there was fillin the tank and cleanin the windshield. Woman settin there in the car. The old boy drivin had gone in to take a leak or whatever. Anyway we pulled in facin this other car and I'm kindly layin there with my head back waitin on the old boy and I wasnt even thinkin about this woman but I could see her. Just settin there, sort of lookin around. Well directly she sat straight up and commenced to holler like she was bein murdered. I mean just a hollerin. She was lookin over at us and I thought Gene had done somethin. Exposed hisself or somethin. You never knew what he was goin to do. I looked at Gene but he didnt know what the hell was goin on any more than I did. Well here come the old boy out of the men's room and I mean he was a big son of a bitch too. I got out and walked around the car. I thought I was goin crazy. The Oldsmobile had this big ovalshaped grille in the front of it was like a big scoop and when I got around to the front of the car it was just packed completely full of jackrabbit heads. I mean there was a hundred of em jammed in there and the front of the car the bumper and all just covered with blood and rabbit guts and them rabbits I reckon they'd sort of turned their heads away just at impact cause they was all lookin out, eyes all crazy lookin. Teeth sideways. Grinnin. I cant tell you what it looked like. I come damn near hollerin myself. I'd noticed the car was overheatin but I just put that down to the speed we was makin.
The review of these books in the Sunday Times concluded:
McCarthy's border is the division between the workaday world and that which is hidden behind it – terrifying violence, political turmoil, sexual love. Crossing and recrossing it in these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, he has created a masterpiece, one that engages with the tremendous questions of life and death and has the weight to take them on.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt.
I read this book just after I had finished The Crossing, which may partly account for why I hated it so much. The contrast between the diamond-sharp precision of Cormac McCarthy's writing and the sloppiness of John Berendt's is just too glaring to overlook.
I guess everyone knows by now that Midnight is based on the true story of a Savannah antiques dealer who shot the young hustler who was living with him. It ought to be a gripping story, and the setting, Savannah, should be one of the few US cities with its own distinctive atmosphere, slow, courtly, redolent of the Old South. But John Berendt is a New York journalist, not a novelist, and for me he totally fails to capture any of this atmosphere. His book is full of "characters", but he consistently fails to bring them to life, and they remain cardboard caricatures. The dialogue is painfully unrealistic. Every one of his characters speaks in the style of a New York hack journalist. I think it would be impossible to read the book aloud because nobody in real life would ever talk like that. I can't illustrate this with an extract, because I got so disgusted with the book that I threw my copy away before I had even finished it, which is very unusual for me. Two thumbs down.
I suppose I should add that I seem to be in a minority of one with this negative opinion of Midnight. All the British Sunday papers gave rave reviews to the book. Also, I haven't yet seen the movie. I just hope they found a scriptwriter for it who could write some realistic dialogue.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M Pirsig.
My battered old copy of this book has a typical piece of publisher's hype on the cover: "This book will change the way you think and feel about your life." But for once the hype was right. I first read ZAAMM soon after I had given up on religion, and in it I found that one could distinguish right from wrong, and learn to follow the right, without any need for a supernatural framework. It really did change the way I think and feel about my life.
The book takes the form of a motorcycle journey across America in which the author, who has had a nervous breakdown, gradually rebuilds his own life and his relationship with his 11-year-old son Chris, who is riding pillion. But that stark description doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this many-layered book, rich with anecdote, allegory and discussion of Greek and oriental philosophy. In the edition that I have, the book ends on a note of glowing optimism as the motorbike coasts down through the Promised Land of the California winefields towards San Francisco:
Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.
If you buy a recent edition of ZAAMM, you will find that it has a shattering postscript telling a tragic sequel to this essentially true story.
By the way, the reason my copy is so battered is that both my kids have also read it, and I think it has helped them to form a philosophy of life as much as it did for me.
The Folding Star, by Alan Hollinghurst.
Alan Hollinghurst is the leading British gay novelist, and just about the only one who is taken seriously in the straight literary world. The Folding Star was shortlisted for the main British literary award, the Booker prize, in 1994. The narrator, Edward Manners, is a single gay man in his thirties who has come to an unnamed city in Belgium to tutor two teenage boys in English. Luc is irresistibly attractive and Edward is soon in love with him. The other boy, Marcel, is stolid and asthmatic. When not teaching the boys, Edward is exploring the gay life of the town, and also working with Marcel's father on a catalogue of the paintings of the town's famous artist. The novel explores the ironic contrasts between his sensitive, aesthetic intellect and his voracious and sometimes crude sexual needs.
You can see the subtlety of the writing in this extract from Luc's second English lesson. The boy's English is perfectly correct and yet somehow stilted and foreign. The atmosphere of the lesson is stiff and slightly awkward at first, but then eases up and becomes mildly flirtatious even as they are talking about fish.
'Let's talk about food!' I suggested.
'Okay,' he said with a shrug, but then settled forward as if after all this might be quite fun. 'I will name fifteen kinds of fish.'
When the slightly fast clock in the adjacent sitting-room softly bonged twelve we had ransacked the slippery markets of St Andrew's Quay for a whole catalogue of eels, mussels, monkfish, dace and bream, and were growing almost hilarious as we hauled up odder and more doubtful species from neglected buckets and murky tanks. Luc's fish vocabulary was so comprehensive that I found myself learning from him; it was all good St Narcissus drill, of course, drummed in by some insanely thorough master, and I saw that though Luc notched up rarities like chad and wrasse to his credit he had no very clear idea what they looked or tasted like. Still, while the game lasted, we were suddenly closer, our awkwardnesses forgotten. The chase became a race. 'I'm surprised you should have overlooked grayling,' I said censoriously; and he slapped the table and said, 'Yes, and what about mullet, Edward, what about mullet!' so that I grinned and my heart sprinted at this first real naming, the first time I had become a person, my own name burning my face like some heartfelt endearment.
I won't give away any more of the plot, which has all the rich complications of real life. Some people preferred Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, but I thought that was a bit artificial and formulaic compared to this one. His third novel, The Spell, has just appeared and has been enthusiastically reviewed.
The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault.
This is a historical novel, one of three that Mary Renault wrote on the life of Alexander the Great. The narrator is Bagoas, the Persian boy who is orphaned at the age of ten when the rest of his family are killed in a raid on their home. The raiders capture Bagoas and have him castrated and sold into slavery and prostitution. From this gruesome beginning, he rises into the court of the Persian King Darius. Darius dies when his army is defeated by Alexander's forces, and Bagoas is taken into the service (and before long into the bed) of Alexander.
In this extract, Bagoas has been bullied by some of Alexander's guards, who stand him up against a board and throw spears near him. Alexander appears and rescues him, angrily dismissing the soldiers.
I would have prostrated myself. But the closest javelin had pierced my sleeve, pinning me to the target. He strode forward, looked to be sure it had not gone through flesh, wrenched it out and flung it away. I stepped from among the shafts, and again began the prostration.
'No, get up,' he said. 'You need not keep doing that, it is not our custom. A good coat spoiled. You shall have the price of a new one.' He touched the rent with his fingers. 'I am ashamed of what I have seen. They are raw; we have had no time to train them; but I am ashamed they are Macedonians. Nothing like that will ever happen again, that I can promise you.' He put his arm across my shoulders, patted me lightly, and, smiling into my eyes, said, 'You behaved yourself very well.'
I don't know what I had felt until then. Perhaps just awe of his splendid anger.
The living chick in the shell has known no other world. Through the wall comes a whiteness, but he does not know it is light. Yet he taps at the white wall, not knowing why. Lightning strikes his heart; the shell breaks open.
I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a king.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.
Bagoas accompanies Alexander as his army conquers most of the known world, as far as India, and back again to Persia, though he always has to share Alexander's affection with Hephaistion, who has been Alexander's lover since boyhood. This is a beautifully written and historically accurate account of the life of one of the greatest military leaders who ever lived, as seen by the eunuch who became his lover.
Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance, by Richard Isay: a psychoanalyst's guide to gay self-acceptance; reviewed on 19 July 1998 and 22 July 1998.
Brokeback Mountain, by Annie Proulx: a short novel (or a long short story) about two cowboys and the life that they didn't share together; reviewed (briefly) on 27 April 1999.
Biological Exuberance, by Bruce Bagemihl: a scientific account of homosexual behaviour all over the place in the animal world; reviewed on 5 October 1999.
Pieces of Light, by Adam Thorpe: the latest novel by one of the best living British writers (warning: no gay content here); reviewed (briefly) on 30 January 2000.
The Sexual Brain, by Simon LeVay: a neurobiologist looks at the genetic basis for homosexuality; reviewed on 15 March 2000 (see also the discussion on 3 April 2000).
In Awe, by Scott Heim: a novel by a young gay American author; reviewed on 10 September 2000.
The Trouble With Normal, by Michael Warner: a radical queer critique of sexual ethics; reviewed on 15 March 2001, 12 July 2001 and 19 August 2001.
The Night Listener, by Armistead Maupin: a thoughful and unsettling novel from the author best known for the hilarious Tales of the City series; reviewed on 21 May 2002.
At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O'Neill: a stunningly well written, complex novel set in Dublin during the First World War featuring gay self-discovery, Irish liberation and much, much more; reviewed on 10 February 2003.
The Blackwater Lightship, by Colm Tóibín: another excellent novel from Ireland, featuring, among other things, an absorbing contrast between gay and straight "families"; reviewed (briefly) on 18 June 2003.
Bad Dirt, by Annie Proulx: more short stories about darkest Wyoming; reviewed on 26 March 2005.
The Master, by Colm Tóibín: a masterly insight into the life of the novelist Henry James; reviewed on 26 March 2005.
A Dead Man in Deptford, by Anthony Burgess: the life of Christopher Marlowe, including a steamy (but probably apocryphal) gay affair with his patron; reviewed on 28 March 2005.
An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears: a historical mystery set in seventeenth-century Oxford; reviewed on 28 March 2005.
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst: Hollinghurst's best yet – a scintillating account of high life and gay life in Thatcher's London; reviewed on 4 January 2006.
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