Benjamin Alire Sáenz's 'Everything Begins And Ends At The Kentucky Club': Book Review

BY GARTH GREENWELL

The characters in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s masterful collection are all travelers between borders. Most obviously, they cross between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, where each of them at some point finds himself in the bar of the book’s title. But these seven stories are really concerned with more difficult boundaries—of class, language, sexuality—that both set these men apart and divide them from themselves.

Juarez is famous from American headlines as one of the most violent cities in the world. Sáenz, who teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso, doesn’t look away from its troubles, and his characters live with the knowledge that “all the laughter in the world could be swept away by a capricious wind at any moment.” But their lives aren’t reducible to headlines, and what remains of these stories isn’t the shock of tragedy and crime, but the human response to it.

Tragedy and crime are at the heart of the book’s first story, “He Has Gone to Be with the Women.” Two men—one a well-known Mexican-American writer, the other a Mexican visiting to care for a dying relative—speak after months of silent glances in an El Paso café. As they begin to know each other, tentatively and uncertainly, each explores the grief the other carries—two brothers lost to a car accident, a mother to the plague of violence against women in Juarez—and grief becomes an occasion for love. “His tears were soaking my shirt,” the writer says. “I wanted to taste them, bathe in them, drown in them.” “I wasn’t the falling-in-love kind of man,” he says later. “But watching Javier at that moment, I wanted to need him. I wanted him to be the air I breathed.” When Javier disappears, gone to “all the nameless women who have been buried in the desert,” the narrator doesn’t know what to do with the feeling that has been awakened: “I was angry at my own heart that refused to give up hope despite the fact that I begged it to give up.” 

Earlier this month, Sáenz was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction—he is the first Latino writer to receive the prize—and the book is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. It has been met with a great deal of praise, but some critics have raised concerns about the emotionality of these stories, hinting at something excessive or melodramatic about them—as though one final border they cross is that of propriety, the closely policed lines of what we sometimes call “good taste,” lines seldom free from often unstated assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality.

It may be true that the emotion in these stories strikes a higher pitch than most current American literary fiction. When passion breaks out in these pages, often after being long repressed, it can take on operatic force: “I wasn’t just sobbing, I was howling,” says the narrator of one story before making a confession of love. “I kept hitting my own chest as if I was trying to tell my heart not to do what it was doing, to stop hurting me, my heart, and I found myself kneeling on the floor and howling and I didn’t even know why.”

But such notes are in the heart’s range, and as I read I found Sáenz’s willingness to sound them brave and bracing. One of the glories of this collection—one of the best new books I’ve read in years—is its full-throatedness, its unapologetic willingness to give voice to extremes of experience, even when those extremes challenge the tidy canons of propriety. Good art, especially good queer art, has always posed such challenges. Love, grief, hopelessness and rage wear their brightest clothes in Sáenz’s work, sharing the page with a clear-eyed acknowledgment that the world is seldom accommodating of individual desires. Love may not often win in these gorgeous stories, but it is always fierce. 

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David McConnell’s 'American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men': Book Review

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. Beginning this fall, he will be an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

David McConnell’s 'American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men': Book Review

BY GARTH GREENWELL

In this unnervingly beautiful new book, David McConnell investigates six murders of gay men over the last two decades. McConnell’s focus is on the perpetrators of these crimes—men he interviews and corresponds with and locks eyes with at their trials—and one of the most disturbing and profound aspects of his account is the fact that of desire and rage, the two terms of his subtitle, desire is by far the more resonant. However twisted or thwarted, desire is everywhere in this book—in the victims, who sometimes long for their attackers; in the murderers, some of them gay, all of them longing for an ideal they feel is under threat; and in the author himself, who hovers somewhere between perpetrator and victim, an ambiguity he makes fascinating use of in the book. 

The most gripping of these stories concerns Darrell Madden, who in Oklahoma City in 2007 murdered the 62-year-old Steven Domer (See Towleroad's coverage HERE). With a fellow white nationalist, Bradley Qualls—a partner in the crime whom Madden, in a little drama of dominance, would also kill—Madden posed as a hustler to lure his victim. As he does often in this book, McConnell takes us into the scene, putting us closer to the action than we might like. “Gazes snagged on them, slid down their bodies, and were nervously yanked loose,” he writes, cannily putting us in both perspectives at once--that of the two men waiting for their prey, but also of the men driving past them, most of them much older, most of them solitary, most of them on their own sort of hunt.

McConnell has written two novels, and it’s out of a novelist’s respect for the twists and textures of individual lives that he refuses familiar explanations for the violence he describes. He rejects from the start the idea of “gay panic,” but he also questions the category of “hate crimes,” proposing instead that we call these acts “honor killings.”

These murders aren’t about individual hatred, McConnell argues, and they’re finally less about attacking a despised group than defending the honor of an ideal of what manhood means: “These killers….saw, or needed to see, themselves as believers, soldiers, avengers, purifiers, as exemplars of manhood.” This may be a question of emphasis—surely a preoccupation with honor entails hating whatever brings dishonor—but McConnell is convincing in his insistence that each of these killers is “a far more convoluted being than our culture...wants to allow.”

This is certainly the case with Darrell Madden, whose life emerges as equal parts tragedy and farce. McConnell spent years meeting and corresponding with Madden, and he gives us his history in pieces, moving repeatedly from the scene of murder to the life that led to it. We learn that Madden had a brief career as a porn actor, and that what led him to white nationalism was his own desperate attraction to skinheads.

Madden speaks to McConnell about these things with an openness suggesting trust and fondness, feelings that are to a significant degree reciprocated. McConnell acknowledges Madden’s charm and attractiveness—“he was, almost reflexively, an expert seducer”—and the scenes between them read like an uncensored version of the relationship between Perry Smith and Truman Capote in In Cold Blood. Hidden desire and fascination pulse in the paragraphs of Capote’s classic book; in American Honor Killings, that desire is laid bare.

And so the most interesting character in these pages is finally McConnell himself, and the book’s key investigations are of his own motives and desires. He writes of “the joy of violence,” of “a wild physical pleasure of release,” of “brute and happy manliness”; he claims, speaking of skinhead culture, that “the solidarity the group engenders is, basically, love.” It’s clear that McConnell understands and to some extent shares the longing for pure manhood and ideal brotherhood that sets the men he studies on their paths. “What am I,” he writes, worrying at “the nagging question of whether I’m more Steve or more Darrell”—more victim or perpetrator of these crimes.

That’s a question many men might ask, and what’s most exciting about American Honor Killings is the way its nuance and detail sharpen the point of its cultural critique. McConnell reads individual acts of violence against gay men as signs of stress or fracture in an ideal masculinity we collectively adore. “The constant irony,” McConnell writes in a telling passage about Madden, “was that daily life among the skinheads in prison was strikingly similar to scenes from the gay porn movies Darrell had appeared in not long before.” The internet is full of porn for gay men in which gay men are brutalized, often by men who match Madden’s skinhead ideal of manhood.  This lends credence to the most unsettling conclusion of this excellent book: that the desire in McConnell’s title is our own.

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. Beginning this fall, he will be an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Writer Augusten Burroughs Marries

A literary union.

From the NYT:

Christopher Robert Schelling, a literary agent, and the writer Augusten Burroughs, who is also his client, were married Monday at Staten Island Borough Hall. Edison Stewart, the deputy city clerk for Staten Island, officiated. Mr. Schelling (left), 50, is the founder of Selectric Artists, an agency in Manhattan that represents fiction and nonfiction writers, as well as musicians. He graduated from DePauw University in Indiana.

Burroughs is the author of eight books including Running with Scissors, Dry, and Magical Thinking.

Congrats!

Right-Winger Says California Dept. of Education is 'Raping Innocence of Children' with New LGBT-Inclusive Books List

Go to the California Department of Education's updated 'Recommended Literature List' and search for "lgbt, gay, lesbian, homosexual, queer, bisexual, transgender, "sexual minority", "marriage equality" in the box titled "annotation" and dozens of LGBT-inclusive titles appear, many of them new to the list. The list is recommended reading for K-12 students.

The Mercury News reports:

While the state list has addressed controversial topics before, this is the first time it included works that were honored by the Stonewall Book Awards, which have been given out since 1971 to recognize contributions to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature.

"We have titles in the list for the LGBT community for multiple recommended grade levels," said Roxane Fidler, the CDE's education programs consultant. "There are books from the Stonewall Book Awards, which has not previously been on the list," Fidler said.

The online catalog, Recommended Literature: Pre-Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve, contains more than 7,800 books meant to prepare students for college, a career and the changing world, Fidler said. Because the newest titles were published in 2012, some of the included books embrace today's cultural and civil rights challenges. It was last revised in 2008.

The list includes the first-ever recommended title with a transgender theme:

The book is titled “I Am J.” It’s a young adult novel about a teen, Jennifer, who identifies and sees herself as a boy.

In one passage, her father, Manny, lovingly tells J — as she begins calling herself—  that she doesn’t have to take a traditional path in life. But it’s clear he’s talking about professions, not gender identity.
 
Manny stood up and pulled J into a hug. “You’re still my baby girl,” he said into J’s baseball cap. His voice was sweet and crooning. “You’ll always be my baby girl."

Some right-wingers are freaking out:

Sandy Rios, host of a morning radio show on American Family Radio or AFR Talk, called this list of titles "appalling. "

"It's a frightening trend," Rios said in an interview. "The reading lists are very overtly propagating a point of view that is at odds with most American parents. Leftist educators are advocates of everything from socialism to sexual anarchy. It's very base; it's raping the innocence of our children."

But Fidler said the works are not mandatory reading and they are chosen based on quality not ideology.

There are "no controversial books," Fidler said. The teachers, librarians, administrators, curriculum planners and college professors who curated the list rarely had trouble deciding whether a well-written book should not be included because of its topic, she added.

Prop 8 Attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies Ink Book Deal

A big book is coming next year on the federal challenge to Proposition 8 now headed to the Supreme Court, the AP reports:

Democrat David Boies and Republican Theodore B. Olson have signed with Viking for "A Just Cause: Law, Love, and the Case for Marriage Equality." Viking told The Associated Press on Wednesday the book is scheduled for mid-2014.

"Our collective journey tells of a crucial and historical civil rights movement that brings us closer to the ideals on which our country was founded," Boies, 71, said in a statement issued by Viking.

Olson, 72, said he and Boies between them have "nearly 100 years in the law."

"We have never handled a more important, dramatic and emotionally compelling challenge," he said in a statement.

Have Yourself A Very Barbary Christmas: VIDEO

One of the main themes in author Armistead Maupin's works, particularly his iconic Tales of The City series, is the idea of the logical family: if our biological relations reject us, we can make our own kin.

Still, with this family in place, there's then the added pressure to find a partner, a stress Michael "Mouse" Tolliver struggled under for a large portion of the Tales narrative. Even amidst all the mystery and intrigue at 28 Barbary Lane, relationship woes still creep in.

AFTER THE JUMP, Mouse and Mary-Ann, played by Marcus D'Amico and Laura Linney in the original mini-series adaptation, discuss the pressures Christmas can put on the single among us. (Relevant scene begins at the two-minute mark.)