This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outré reading.
Purnell, a performance artist, musician, filmmaker, and writer, dives deep into the pathologies and delights of sex among gay men in this dizzying novel.
In these pages, the unnamed, formerly homeless protagonist, a “jaded judgmental borderline misanthrope” who’s also really funny, describes so much sex with a “nameless void of men” that it’s a wonder he doesn’t rub his fingers raw from undoing his pants so often. There’s sex on the protagonist’s European concert tour, bad sex with a Satanist in America (“if this was Satan’s best sex warrior it stood to reason why Satanism in general was such a PR nightmare”), and an obsession with a straight co-worker that compels the protagonist to masturbate in the office while watching him. Structured in short vignettes, the book is mostly told in a confessional first person, which make the stories feel autofictional. There are so many short episodes of sex that the book reads more like a diary—a vibrant, saucy, dishy, punk diary. One example: The protagonist, feeling lonely, hires a sex worker to act like a boyfriend, so the guy, just doing what he’s paid for, keeps whispering “I love you, boyfriend” in the protagonist’s ear. “He was beginning to feel like a boyfriend in that he was already annoying the fuck out of me,” Purnell writes in a typically knowing, self-lacerating insight. There are moments when Purnell steps back from offending delicate sensibilities to documenting real sadness and drawing wisdom in the process. The protagonist encounters a former boyfriend, “once a big beautiful star” who “has collapsed in on its own weight and turned into a black hole.” This man takes the protagonist to his parents’ home for Thanksgiving to an emotional void; his parents serve TV dinners for the holiday meal. “But this was one of the many holes he had in himself that he always made visible to me,” Purnell writes. The only nagging question this book engenders is why it’s packaged as fiction at all; it reads more like a memoir/manifesto that gay sex is still a rebellious act.
This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outré reading.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-3745-3898-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh gathering that highlights the work of mostly well-known story writers through their lesser-known works.
A well-selected anthology of short fiction, ranging from long to flash, representing the last half-century.
Former Granta editor Freeman writes in his introduction that where the 1960s were once seen as a fulcrum of the short story form, the succeeding decade has “begun to seem like one of the most fertile periods of American life.” Certainly that was a time when writing by members of marginalized communities, post-apocalyptic science fiction, and politically engaged reexaminations of history came to the fore. All these strands are represented in Freeman’s collection, which begins with Toni Cade Bambara, a writer not heard from often enough, whose “The Lesson,” from 1972, finds a group of Black children inside F.A.O. Schwarz under the aegis of a well-meaning college graduate who has returned to the neighborhood. The narrator, beholding a $35 clown doll (that would be about $220 today), imagines asking for the money from her mother: “ ‘You wanna who that cost what?’ she’d say, cocking her head to the side to get a better view of the hole in my head.” The exotic field trip yields one lesson for the children: “White folks crazy.” Certainly you’d think so on reading Grace Paley’s “A Conversation With My Father,” with its story within a story of a boy who has become addicted to drugs in “the fist of adolescence” and whose mother, not wishing him to feel isolated, joins him in junkiedom. Andrew Holleran evokes the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in “The Penthouse,” a long story from 1999 that is full of ghosts but scores the comic aperçu that because sex is off the table, “it seemed as if that was all there was to do in New York: eat in public.” George Saunders packs a story into 392 words; finally recognized as a literary writer, Stephen King turns in a characteristically spooky tale; and the closing stories, from Ted Chiang and Lauren Groff, speak to impending extinction, death, and fear.
A fresh gathering that highlights the work of mostly well-known story writers through their lesser-known works.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984877-80-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.
Characters from the fringes of society grapple with desire and fury in this collection of short stories.
Early on in “The Pull,” a story about a young swimmer from a war-torn country, the narrator describes her childhood as the “kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.” The stories here are exactly that kind: insistently visceral, pushing into, and past, the reader’s comfort zone. Many of the stories center erotic experiences. In “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Bosch works in a modern-day fish processing plant, and he finds boundless pleasure in the arms of a young male co-worker. In “Cusp,” a teenage girl smuggles drugs into a local prison and shares her body with the prisoners as a way of being closer to her incarcerated brother. But if these stories teach us about lust, they also flip to the other side of that same coin: These are narratives full of deep rage. Some of this rage takes place inside of intimate relationships, as in “A Woman Signifying,” in which the protagonist deliberately burns her face against a radiator to create a “symbol” of her anger at her lover. Sometimes this rage is social, as in “Drive Through,” about an encounter with a panhandler at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Yuknavitch (The Misfit’s Manifesto, 2017, etc.) keeps readers’ heads pressed against what is hardest to see, and this doesn’t always land. Some of the rage can feel self-righteous; some of the desire pushes deep into taboo and veers toward unpalatable. But where there are risks, there are rewards, and these howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity.
Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53487-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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