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THE GENIUS OF DESIRE

Name: THE GENIUS OF DESIRE
Author: Brian Bouldrey
ISBN: 0-345-38334-6

by Brian Bouldrey ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1993

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Growing up gay in an extended Catholic family—in a first novel that, despite a self-congratulatory tone and a narrator who too often justifies himself without irony, makes for a credible eulogy to a long-lost age. ``At first I didn't even know that my prime lusts were of an aberrant kind,'' says Michael Bellman, who spends his quality time as a youngster in Monsalvat, Michigan, among a family that includes great-grandmother Kaiser and her six children—grandfather John, uncles James and Thomas, Aunt Teresa, and the sisters Charlene and Charlotta. There is also cousin Anne, who pulls the heads off of Barbie dolls, and, most significantly for Michael, her older brother Tommy. With his cigarettes, fringed suede coat, guitar, and boa constrictor, he is the secret love of Michael's life. The early parts of the story fill space with instances drawn from the eccentricities or cruelties of this motley crew—ranging from Anne's confirmation party to spearfishing with Uncle Tom to arguments about Catholicism. Then Michael, his sexual nature undefined, has a revelation one day in a drugstore when he finds himself drawn to the centerfold in Playgirl instead of Playboy. Later, Uncle Tom dies and cousin Tommy disappears, whereupon Michael moons after him and daydreams as to what might have been before diving into the ugliness and the adventure of reality. Michael, the self-described ``genius of desire,'' decides to hate his family and ``chase after the ugly.'' ``It's the familiar in the strange that terrifies me,'' he says. It's an overly familiar story, however, and not strange enough, replete with various types (often patronized) who owe as much to sitcom as to literature. Still, Bouldrey, and the reader, have a bit of fun with the story and the secondary characters, even if the narrator, coming-of-age as he comes out, takes himself all too seriously.

Pub Date: June 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-345-38334-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BEST AMERICAN GAY FICTION 3
edited by Brian Bouldrey

- BOOK REVIEW
BEST AMERICAN GAY FICTION
edited by Brian Bouldrey

- BOOK REVIEW
BEST AMERICAN GAY FICTION 1996
edited by Brian Bouldrey

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
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- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.