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Puppies by John Valentine

(Erstwhile Press, 1979)

 

This book is pretty much entirely devoted to John Valentine's sexual encounters with teenage boys (the youngest is 12).  His sexual obsession with boys began while he was in high school, when he slept with many of his friends and often fooled around with them.  He can't seem to grow out of this phase and continues seducing and molesting boys well into his adulthood (mostly in Los Angeles).  He justifies his illegal behavior by telling himself (and the reader) that he only seduces boys who are willing or come on to him, and this rational seem to save him from any moral doubt or guilt.

Given the controversial and disturbing focus of this book, it's surprising to report that, for the most part, it is charming.  Valentine's lack of guilt or worry makes him a very affable and (almost) sympathetic narrator.  He describes all the boys he meets with a sympathetic complexity; they don't appear to be victims  or or sexual objects, but quite charming and appealing boys who are happy to engage in sexual relations with an older man.

Valentine worked on fringe and countercultural newspapers and always seems to be living in wretched conditions, but he seems not to mind his squalid existence in the least.  He's a good writer, and a generous one; there's a poignancy to many of these portraits, especially those of his high school friends, most of whom were killed in the Korean War.

The Gustave Sonata by Rose Tremain

(Norton, 2016)

 

This new novel by a writer I have long admired is divided into three distinct parts.  I loved the first two and did not like the third section very much at all, so the book was ultimately disappointing.

The main character of this novel is Gustav Perl.  He is born in a town in Mitterland, Switzerland, and spends the rest of his life there (except for a trip to Paris when he's middle-aged).  Gustav was born in 1942, when Switzerland and the Swiss were doing their best to stay out of the war that raged all around them.  Gustav's sympathetic father loses his job as the town's Assistant Chief of police for falsifying records to allow Jews to enter Switzerland after the emigration from Germany has been outlawed.  He dies shortly thereafter from a heart attack, and Gustav and his mother Emilie are left to fend for themselves in post-war Switzerland. Gustav befriends Anton Zweibel, a Jewish boy his age who is the only child of doting and well-t0-do parents.  The only fun or warmth Gustav experiences in his childhood and youth occurs only when he is with the Zweibels, who are very good to him.  Anton, a brilliant piano prodigy, attempts to win awards at national competitions but is always too nervous to perform well.

The second part of the book goes back in time to relate the courtship and troubled marriage of Gustav's parents, and Tremain does a wonderful job of evoking these interesting characters and  the world they live in (this is true of both the first two sections).  The reader is transported and engaged and the book seems poised to conclude in the same compelling way.

But it doesn't.  In the third section Tremain jumps ahead 40 years to the 1990s.  Gustav and Anton are both middle-aged and Emilie is now a nasty and querulous old lady.  This section is ostensibly about Gustav and Anton realizing that they have loved one another since they were young boys, but not before Anton has a nervous breakdown and is committed to a psychiatric hospital.  There's nothing, of course, inherently wrong with this conclusion, but somehow Tremain, who is usually so smart and sure-footed, falters.  All the characters seem less alive and less engaging that their younger counterparts, and the world they inhabit -- the same small Swiss city -- seems less vibrant and authentic.  A somewhat mawkish fuzziness hangs over this last section, almost as if it were written by a different, inferior, writer.

 

The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson

 (Virago Modern Classics, 1985)

 

This book was originally published in 1961 by Anthony Blond Ltd.  It is the story of Josephine, a young woman who has  a "nervous breakdown" while a student at Oxford and is sent to a "mental asylum."  Her therapy there seems to be mostly confined to chats with a sympathetic German refugee nurse,  electroshock treatments, and long walks in the surrounding countryside.  And then she meets a young man, another patient at the asylum, who draws her out of herself, introduces her to the pleasures of sex, and then abruptly leaves her (and the asylum) without saying goodbye. But Josephine, despite her mental fragility, is a strong, resourceful, and oddly cheerful woman who takes her boyfriend's abandonment in stride, as she does with her beloved and somewhat suffocating mother's death. 

It's interesting to note that this book predates Sylvia Plath's  The Bell Jar by two years, but deals with a similar character in a similar situation.  Joesphine is nowhere near as smart and savvy  as Esther Greenwood; in fact she's rather dense about most things, and so this book lacks The Bell Jar's poetic brilliance.  Nevertheless, it's a quirky and interesting read, and Josephine is an original and engaging character (and narrator).

That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis

 (Harcourt Brace, 1956)

 

 

That Uncertain Feeling is Amis' s second novel, published a few years after Lucky Jim.  It's a  comedy in much the same vein, about the misadventures, professional and romantic, of a young Welshman.  John Lewis is married to an unsentimental and practical woman names Jean.  They have two children (one only referred to as "Baby"), and John works as an assistant clerk in the local public library. His decision to apply for the job of sub-director leads to all sorts of comical mayhem, especially when he begins an affair with the elusive yet demanding wife of the Library Committee's chairman.

Most of the characters in the book are selfish and unlikable, but they seem human, and Amis does a good job of creating farce around their botched assignations.  I laughed out loud several times while reading this book (which I rarely do).  Like Lucky Jim, it leaves a bitter aftertaste, but the darkness is better integrated in this book and it is far less misogynistic.   For these reasons, I  enjoyed it far more than Lucky Jim.

 

Eminent Maricones by Jaime Manrique

 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)

 

I've had this book by my old friend Jaime Manrique on my shelf for many years, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it.  The eminent maricones Jaime writes about (in separate essays ) are himself, Manuel Puig, Reinaldo Arenas,  Federico Garcia Lorca, and another man also named Jaime Manrique.

The book opens with a wonderful autobiographical essay about Jaime's childhood and adolescence in Columbia.  He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy man from an old and important Columbian family, but grew up in poverty with his mother and sister.  Jaime's portrait of Manuel Puig and his remembrance of Reinaldo Arenas are fresh and interesting, and do a nice job of revealing both Jaime and their subject.  His essay on Federico Garcia Lorca, which  focuses on Lorca's own homophobia and gradual liberation, is an important and clarifying piece of work. 

Eminent Maricones is a  engaging and exciting book.

The Joy Ride and After by A. L. Barker

(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963)

 

This novella (the title novella in this book of several) by a British writer was published  by Charles Scribner's Sons in the US, and The Hogarth Press in the UK, in 1963.  I had never head of A. L. Barker (a woman) . Apparently, she  published quite prolifically throughout the second half of the 20th Century and was highly regarded in literary circles but never had much commercial success.

I found her writing in The Joy Ride to be bracing and vivid, and beautifully controlled and regulated.  Very calm and assured.  Clean, but not antiseptic.  This story, which is set in a provincial mid-century English city, revolves around a struggling automobile garage and the cafe across the street: both cheerless places, as are the people who work at, or visit, them.  Barker creates engaging and complex characters who are all struggling -- some compassionately, some ruthlessly -- for a better life.  I liked and admired this book, and look forward to reading more A. L. Barker.

As If By Magic by Angus Wilson

(Secker and Warburg, 1973)

 

I didn't manage to finish this book, but I read more than 300 of its 400 pages before I gave up.  It's a messy, poorly conceived and paced novel that follows two characters who are distantly related: Hamo, a middle-aged botanist who has developed a new form of "magic" rice that is changing agricultural practices around the world, and Alexandra, his goddaughter, who flees with her two male lovers first to a commune in Morocco and later to see a Swami in India.

The encounters that Hamo and Alexandra have with many people on their journeys (Hamo is going around the world to visit rice-producing areas) are related in punishing and exhaustive detail, and scenes where very little is actually happening drag on for pages and pages.  With some brutal editing, a dark and daring comic novel might be achievable, but the length and scope of the book -- intended no doubt to make it an "important" novel -- slowly but surely prevent it from assuming any sort of compelling shape or pace.  This is a shame, because there are a few very funny scenes, and many original and interesting characters.  Alexandra's simultaneous affairs with two men (one of who is the father of her baby) is erotically charged but never ignites, and Hamo's obsession with, and pursuit of, beautiful boys, while daring and boldly explored, finally becomes tedious and distasteful.

The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis

 (Little, Brown, 2006)

 

A smart, quirky book, fun and interesting to read, but ultimately disappointing.

The Thin Place is set  in, and mostly about, the small town of Verennes, which seems to be in northern New York  near the Canadian border.  It describes and follows the lives of many of the inhabitants of this town over perhaps a month-long period in early summer.  In addition to the large cast of human beings, the narrator also inhabits the minds of  many animals, both domestic (dogs and cats) and wild (beavers).   The book does not  seem to have a central character or a plot, and perhaps this is why its parts are greater than the whole. 

Davis is a very smart, odd, and playful writer, and appears to see the world -- flora and fauna -- from both a scientific and spiritual perspective. This duality of vision gives the book an idiosyncratic complexity I found both admirable and rewarding.   She is able to create original and compelling characters (both human and animal), but seems unwilling, or unable, to create any sort of plot.  The Thin Place ends with a robbery and shooting at a church service where many of the characters are assembled, and this seems an inorganic and unlikely conclusion to a novel that is originally conceived and beautifully composed.

I've read and admired Davis's earlier novel, The Walking Tour, and now look forward to reading more of her novels.

In the Purely Pagan Sense by John Lehmann

(Blond and Briggs, 1976)

 

 

A very unusual book.  A memoir in the form of a novel, in which Lehmann exhustively and in great detail describes (just about) all of his sexual experiences with boys and men before, during, and after WWII.  Most of the book is set in Vienna, where Lehmann lived before the War, and London, where he lived during and after.  Lehmann apparently had no qualms or misgivings about his sexuality and pursued, and bedded, younger men with impressive frequency and success.  (Apparently he was a handsome man with a big cock.)  Because he basically had only one type -- younger well-built boys with shapely buttocks -- the encounters he describes don't have much variety or singularity (except for a few boys who have kinks that are memorable), and despite its frank and detailed descriptions of male bodies and sexual acts, the book becomes a little tedious and almost unpleasant.  Lehmann has an entitled, grasping attitude; his supreme confidence -- almost arrogance -- which helped him seduce so many boys, does not help him seduce the reader.

 

In The Hollow of His Hand by James Purdy

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986)

 

I think I might have liked this best of all the Purdy novels I've read -- it's less gory and violent, and the book deals with archetypes in a very tender and original way.

Chad Coultas was born to a wealthy and distinguished family in Yellow Brook, a small Midwestern city, but his real father is a beautiful and imposing Indian name Decautur, who fathered Chad when he was only 14.  Fourteen years later Decautur returns to Yellow Brook from "across" -- serving heroically in WWI, and sets about reclaiming his son.  Chad is kidnapped twice -- once by Decautur and once by Lewis Coultas, his "legal" father.  Both of these kidnappings are wild and dangerous adventures involving jewel thieves, crazed Pentacostalists, deaf and dumb and sexually voracious twin Indian girls, and a 90-year-old private investigator who sets out to find Chad and return him to Yellow Brook.

This is all related in Purdy's inimitable style, and is set, like all his books, just a bit on the far side of reality, verging on the dream world.  It isn't necessarily homoerotic, but the male body is as much an object of lust and desire -- and beauty -- as the female, and that gives the book an unusual and delicious flavor. 

Decautur and Chad, as they take off across the distinctively American countryside, bring to mind  Huck and Jim lighting out for the territory: a dark man and a pale(r) boy finding comfort and joy -- love -- in one another's company.