IN TONGUES (Book Review)

By Thomas Grattan

 

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) 

 

 

There’s a lot that’s right about this novel. The voice is distinct, the writing very good and yet there still seems to be something off. 

 

I suspect it’s by design. It’s the main character, after all, whom I did not come to embrace. Hard to like a book when you never connect to the central character.

 

It’s 2001 and Gordon moves from Minnesota to New York City, staying in a rundown area of Brooklyn, looking for sex in parks while working as a stocker at a grocery store. The sex in parks scenario feels like a gay novel cliché, the character partaking always getting it easily and often. Another gay cliché in the book involves how a young gay man (Gordon is mid-twenties) is a lure for rich older gays. (Do NOT read Edmund White’s most recent book, The Humble Lover, about a rich old man obsessed over a young, self-absorbed ballet dancer.) 

 

Gordon feels aimless and passive throughout the story. Things just happen to him. Jobs fall in his lap. Men may seem disinterested but, no, they always want him. He’s not particularly considerate with his bestie, Janice, nor to his parents, nor to Philip, Gordon’s de facto benefactor. To be fair, Philip is rather aloof when he isn’t being direct and/or mildly cranky.

 

The relationship between rich, seventy-something Philip and Gordon is supposed to be the heart of the story, but there is very little heart in it. There are two scenes in which Gordon steps up as a caretaker, perhaps more, for Philip but the relationship generally has a stilted coldness to it that kept me from caring.

 

Moreover, Gordon has a loafer mentality and he does things that made me cringe. That’s not going to end well, I’d often tell myself as I read. It’s painful to watch a character do stupid things. In the end, we’re supposed to see growth in Gordon. He has a steady, reputable job. He does another dumb thing but then makes a correction…only after an acquaintance points out the potential implications. 

 

As an aside, I feel I may have developed lung cancer from second-hand smoke from all the times Gordon smokes cigarettes in the novel. Maybe all the resulting puffy clouds are supposed to represent the greyness of the novel’s tone. Is that something to strive for?  

 

I suppose my disconnect with the book comes with never really understanding what Gordon cares about. So often in scenes, he seems present rather than passionate. He’s just as aloof as the people around him. People come and go and it doesn’t matter all that much. 

 

I don’t regret reading In Tongues. My response is, however, consistent with what Gordon’s would be: a shrug before moving on.

 

 

  

THE GUNCLE (Book Review)

By Steven Rowley

 

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021)

 

So often, comedy goes unrewarded. I’m in hysterics whenever I watch “Best in Show,” a mockumentary about dog shows, starring Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Parker Posey and Christopher Guest. Oscar nominations? Zero. I worry the neighbors will make a noise complaint to the police as I roar with laughter watching Steve Martin and John Candy play off one another in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” No Oscar love. The Academy honored Martin with an honorary Oscar in 2013 despite never nominating him for any of his film roles. I know the common stance: comedies aren’t that kind of movie. As if being funny is effortless, as if we should shrug and take it for granted.

 

When I say that Steven Rowley’s The Guncle is a fun read, I mean that with the highest regard. He is supremely talented in writing humor. The quips and the antics hold strong throughout the book’s more than three hundred pages.

 

The Guncle is the story of Patrick O’Hara, a forty-three-year-old gay actor, very out and very out of touch with the career that’s allowed him to live comfortably and carefree in Palm Springs. Patrick won a Golden Globe as a sitcom star, but the show finished its run and he, well, ran. That was four years ago, an eternity in Hollywood. Something has kept him away, from his career and life.

 

When his best friend, Sara, dies after a battle with cancer (this is not a spoiler; we know this by the third page of the first chapter), Patrick flies to Connecticut for the funeral and to be with brother, Greg, who happens to have married Sara. I’ll admit that all this connectedness struck me as too convenient for the plot. Yeah, right. I went with it because, contrived or not, it sets things up beautifully.

 

Greg requests that his brother take care of the two kids, Maisie and Grant (ages nine and six), for the three months of summer while Greg gets his act together. Patrick, Mr. No Responsibilities, balks. How the hell would he fit his niece and nephew into his cocktail-abundant Palm Springs life in a plush home never intended for kids as guests much less as inhabitants? 

 

As we see from the outset, Patrick has no business being a stand-in parent:

 

He takes the kids to brunch—horrified that that’s not a thing for them—and breaks it to them that he isn’t going to take them. (Who does that?!) Young Grant asks, “Why do you live in Palm Spwings? Why do you live tho far away?” Patrick explains: “[I]f you must know, I’m young in Palm Springs. Okay? This is the sad truth for gay men. Forty is ancient in Los Angeles, middle-aged in San Francisco, but young in Palm Springs. That’s why I live there.”

 

“You’re forty-three!” Maisie bellowed.

“Who are you, the DMV? Lower your voice.”

 

“That’s almost fifty!” Grant’s eyes grew big.

 

Patrick took the jab, then closed his eyes and bit his lower lip, the observation just shy of a hate crime. Do not punch a child, do not punch a child. “Can we please focus?”

 

Of course, no becomes yes, perhaps for the wrong reasons. I’ll just say that sibling rivalries can make people do crazy things. 

 

Patrick’s way of parenting is, no surprise, unorthodox. He isn’t used to being around children and he does little to edit himself, still drinking, still swearing, still inserting snappy references which fly over the children’s heads. I’m not going to look up the specific quotes, but Maisie often asks, “What are you even saying?” while Grant says, “You talk funny.” Indeed, Patrick drops so many movie references and Oscar Wilde quotes that adults (characters and readers, including myself) don’t always know what Patrick is saying.

 

It’s my understanding that, being a guncle, you get to be the fun relative in the lives of nieces and nephews. Obviously, Patrick’s got that in spades. It’s an interesting premise when he has to shift (somewhat, at least) from guncling to parenting. There are times when the humor seems inappropriate, even for Patrick O’Hara. As Rowley adds deeper layers to the story, his main character resists and almost sabotages his writer. Some of the potency doesn’t quite land. In some ways, that’s all right. A story involving how to cope with the death of your best friend—not to mention the children’s mother—can get melodramatic. No risk of that here. Still, there are grays, something in between, a sweet spot, which The Guncle orbits around. 

 

I’ve known many a Patrick O’Hara when I’ve been more connected to gay circles. They may seem like caricatures—old, campy queens, as they were once known—but they are still around and, in small doses, at least, they are a riot. Often, I’ve sat at coffee or stood in a bar around one or two Patricks and been in awe, not wanting to be them, but at least wishing I could keep up. How do they stay so ON all the time? 

 

I’m surprised that the main character didn’t wear on me after the first hundred pages. Steven Rowley is just that skilled as a writer to make a would-be shell of a character something more and someone whose every comment and action entertains. 

How good is the writing? It’s so jam-packed with humor, I look forward to a second read to laugh and smile again at certain passages and to discover funny bits I glossed over the first time. When Rowley writes almost as a throwaway sentence, “Guests smiled and waved as Patrick weaved through the crowd, many hugged him tight and declared some version of Where have you been?, each putting their emphasis on a different word in the question,” I had to stop, channel my inner Chandler Bing and pose the question with different emphases as well. Again, a FUN read. 

 

As well, Rowley has done the impossible for me personally. I lived in Los Angeles for five years and friends often went to Palm Springs for weekend getaways and the annual White Party. The idea of going along was always a firm HELL, NO for me: too hot, too gay. People would tell me, “But they have misters everywhere,” meaning little showerheads or something that spritz water on you to keep you cool and refreshed. (Or did “misters” really refer to older men?!) I’ve had several friends move to Palm Springs and privately mourned. Looks like I’ll never see him again. Why didn’t he move to Pittsburgh? Rowley regularly mentions the heat in his setting (where he, incidentally, lives), but the descriptions and the places named had me Googling—Ooh, The Parker hotel!—and wondering which month would be best for a heat-intolerant gay like me to finally pay a visit. 

 

Imagine that…a fun read that may reconnect me with old friends. That’s quite something to pull off, Steven Rowley. Bravo!

BOOK REVIEW OF GARTH GREENWELL’S CLEANNESS

For much of my childhood and through my twenties, I didn’t identify as being a reader at all. There wasn’t a single time as a kid when I pulled up the sheets late at night, turned on a flashlight to sneak in extra reading time. (Flashlights were for holding under your chin to look demonic and for making Little Bunny Foo Foo shadow images against the wall.) I read what was required: all the Bronte and Shakespeare works deemed good for you in high school, tons of history texts throughout university and hefty casebooks during law school. I subscribed to newspapers and forgot my first boyfriends were in the same room as I devoured each issue of Entertainment Weekly. I logged a lot of reading time but, because I wasn’t slogging through books by Margaret Atwood, Edmund White and James Joyce, I’d defensively scrunch up my nose when people asked what I was reading. “Nothing!” I’d say. I thought my kind of reading didn’t count.

I’ve always felt that there’s something snobbish and exclusionary about the way some avid readers portray themselves, oohing over all the long listed Booker Prize titles they’ve read and proclaiming that reading Dostoevsky—in Russian, of course—was radically transformative. How could I mention that I liked a book by John Grisham or that I read a breezy “summer read” by Armistead Maupin in frosty January?

All this is a long set-up to saying that sometimes I don’t like the books I’m supposed to like. Translation: My response to literary fiction is often meh or worse. I think it’s a failing of a writer to artificially create barriers to the accessibility of his or her work. (Leave that to poetry.)

A number of years ago, while strolling the aisles of a bookstore, I discovered Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader and I felt like I was having a religious experience just from reading the back cover. His “10 inalienable rights” included “the right not to read”, “the right to skip”, “the right to read anything” and “the right not to finish a book.” Amen. Hallelujah! The book is a delightful read. My copy is chock full of Post-it notes, marking spots where I wanted to stand and applaud.

What do I say then about Garth Greenwell’s short story collection, Cleanness? Greenwell is one of the It gay authors of the moment who received raves for his previous work, What Belongs to You, and who first came to my attention earlier this year when The New York Times Book Review waxed rhapsodic about this follow-up. Indeed, the reviewer offered not a single criticism, instead lauding the work as “bravura writing” and “brilliantly executed”. I added the title to my ever-expanding reading list because of the praise given to how Greenwell writes sex scenes: “While he writes about sex graphically, Greenwell uses a crisp style to disguise the fact that he is really attempting to chart the characters’ complicated emotional needs. The writing about sex...achieves an unusual depth of accuracy both about physical activity and emotional undercurrent.” I felt it might help me to be more honest and fearless in my own writing.

To be sure, Greenwell is a talented writer and the setting is interesting. Each story is set in Sofia, Bulgaria with a common narrator, a gay American teacher, guarded about his sexuality given that homosexuality is not well accepted there. (According to Wikipedia, same-sex activity is legal, anti-discrimination laws have been in place since 2004 and a same-sex marriage conducted in France was recognized by a Bulgarian court last year. Still, it’s not apparently a country where most LGBTQ people feel comfortable being open.) Bulgaria then is the kind of place where a gay writer can continue to write about taboos, repression and shame without his work being dismissed as passé as some editors and publishers seem to do in North America. Greenwell explores these themes, adding tension to his narratives.

Perhaps it’s a fault of mine as a reader, but I was put off by some of Greenwell’s choices regarding form and style. For starters, the each character is identified by a single initial instead of having a name. It’s okay in stories that involve just the narrator and one other character, but it needlessly adds confusion in scenes with multiple characters as in “Decent People” where the narrator interacts with many people at a protest. Who is M.? Has he already mentioned D.? What about K.? Is S. male or female even?

Then there’s the author’s choice to forgo quotations and separate paragraphs for different speakers in passages of dialogue. Question marks only make occasional appearances and it seemed to be random as to when one was used and when one wasn’t. (Maybe there was a pattern but who wants to spend their time reading trying to figure out an individual writer’s very own rules for question marks?)

Why?

I recall the first time I learned about poet ee cummings and the fact that he eschewed the use of capital letters. As a twelve-year-old, I thought that was super cool. Now? Not so much. It’s telling that I can’t recall anything about the poet’s work other than his fondness for lowercase letters.

These choices create unnecessary distractions and blips in comprehension—nothing major but one of a writer’s objectives should be to create a flow in his writing. Punctuation, for instance, exists to make a passage easier to read. Sorry, but abandoning conventions doesn’t make you unconventional (or avant-garde or literary); it’s just irksome. My opinion only. None of this is mentioned in any of the reviews I perused. Still, it’s not a good thing to needlessly irk a reader. It only adds to the crankiness in navigating Greenwell’s fondness for overly long paragraphs which can stretch on for two or three pages. Again, I think some would say that’s something you find in literary fiction. La-di-da.

I was relieved that Greenwell didn’t further stoke my annoyance with flowery prose and esoteric vocabulary. (Okay, there were a couple of adjectives that I could have done without. I almost threw the book against my living room wall when he used seven descriptors for a sound in a single sentence, including the word chthonic. Don’t bother looking it up.)

Maybe I should stick with Calvin & Hobbes comics. (Pure joy. Always.)

I don’t read a lot of short stories but, from so many reviews I’ve read of various collections, they can be hit or miss. That shouldn’t be surprising. Without the ongoing plot and characters that come within the structure of a novel, each short story has to live on its own merits in a shorter space. Of the nine stories in Cleanness, a third of them—“Mentor” (about a student talking about his struggles being gay), “Decent People” (about a protest that seems to build in tension but fizzles out) and “Harbor” about a group of not very interesting acquaintances drinking and hanging out by the sea—failed to resonate with me. Two more, “Gospodar” and “The Little Saint,” are about sadomasochism, with the narrator switching roles from submissive in the former to dominant in the latter. I suppose SM lends itself to shame and repression and may contrast well with any accompanying intimacy. The fact that it’s SM in both felt repetitive.

By far, the best part of the book is the middle section, three linked stories involving a relationship between the older narrator and R., a student in Bulgaria from the Azores. Part of the strength of this section is that there is more time to develop a single relationship, one mixed with desire, love and permission to (momentarily) break free from the perceived restrictions of Bulgaria as the two embark on a trip to Italy. Really, if Greenwell had taken this section and expanded it into a full novel, I’d have been far more satisfied. Maybe I’d have even let go of my quibbles about pretentious writing choices.

Maybe. It’s a simple word, nothing arty about it at all, and yet it carries so many possibilities.