An intriguing and well-written, if emotionally flat, rendering of a gay relationship under siege.
A doctor and his jazz pianist lover square off against intolerance in the Roaring Twenties in this knotty gay romance.
It’s 1923, and Carl Holman, a 32-year-old, up-and-coming surgeon in Portland, Oregon, is attending a society wedding reception when he is smitten with piano player Jimmy Harper. Jimmy sports sandy hair, a trim body, and a strong jaw line, all of them “bathed in light from a stained-glass skylight.” Carl must keep his ogling discreet since he doesn’t know if Jimmy would reciprocate his affections, and because gay sexuality is illegal. That’s just one of many bigotries plaguing Oregon, where the Ku Klux Klan is a potent political force that backs eugenics laws, an education act that could ban Roman Catholic schools, and a general suppression of suspicious cultural influences. (When Jimmy and his band start playing conspicuously Black-sounding hot jazz music at a dance, club-carrying Klan louts insist they cut it out.) Carl gingerly pursues Jimmy, who agrees to a fishing trip that escalates to skinny-dipping, lunch, a Chaplin movie, and a spontaneous make-out session. Jimmy’s fiancee, Mary, dumps him after he confesses his same-sex inclinations, and he moves into Carl’s house, which accommodates much graphic, untrammeled sex. Alas, a boy spies them kissing through a window and the ensuing gossip gets Carl ostracized by neighbors and patients and draws the wrath of his boss, a Klan stalwart who is pressuring him to join the Invisible Empire. Carl’s only hope of salvaging his career is to quiet all the talk by contracting a sham engagement to his lesbian pal Gwen Cook.
Stookey’s period piece, the first installment of his Medicine for the Blues Trilogy, paints a frank, atmospheric portrait of closeted gay life in a hostile time, full of furtive eye contact, assignations in parks, a claustrophobic dread of exposure and violence, and a poignant sense of being shunned and abandoned. (“I don’t want to end up a lonely old fairy,” mourns Jimmy after his breakup with Mary.) The author’s prose, filtered through Carl’s first-person voice and medical sensibility, is often vivid and evocative, whether he’s describing jazz—“The music writhed and pulsated like a heart on an operating table, refusing to stop beating, pounding with joy and rambunctious freedom”—or a sensual touch. (“We delighted in the way the pliable, soft skin rides over the bony areas and adheres to the muscled parts of the body, in the sensations of warmth from the flesh attached by sinews and ligaments to the sturdy armature of skeleton.”) Unfortunately, the novel’s nods to historical details (“I suppose you haven’t heard about the inflation in Germany”) and intellectual fads feel tacked on. Supporting characters like teen hustler Billy Butler, tragic queen Jerry the Fairy, and Gwen’s raucous lover, Charlene Devereaux, are lively and magnetic, but the romantic leads are not. Carl is a staid liberal, Jimmy a bland ingénue, and their interactions often feel stilted. (“Jimmy asked about my work and I shared with him some humorous encounters I’d had with patients recently. Then he told me a funny story about his Uncle Wally’s gall bladder operation.”) The result is a love story that feels more like a yarn about an acquaintance than a tale of real passion.
An intriguing and well-written, if emotionally flat, rendering of a gay relationship under siege.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-7326036-0-8
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Pictograph Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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