By Richard Labonte
"Union Atlantic," by Adam Haslett. Doubleday, 304 pages, $26 hardcover.
The great promise of Haslett's 2002 short story collection, "You Are Not a Stranger Here," is more than realized with this mesmerizing marriage of financial fraud, an elderly woman's melancholy decline into dementia and gay sexual awakening. Doug Fanning is the ruthless financier, a handsome 37-year-old bachelor (and ex-Marine) rattling around near-friendless in a rambling mansion; Charlotte Graves, his cantankerous blue-blood neighbor, is enraged that a stand of trees was sacrificed for Fanning's new home; into this confrontation comes Nate Fuller, a sexy high school senior and slacker who Charlotte, a retired teacher, is tutoring, and who falls madly in love with Doug – eventually bedding the older man. In interviews, Haslett says he started the novel well before the financial collapse that ushered out the era of George W. Bush, but his depiction of banking shenanigans is pitch-perfect. So too is his wrenching portrait of Charlotte's encroaching madness. And the novel's subplot about the imbalanced emotional and sexual entanglement of young Nate and lonely Doug perfectly embodies the power dynamics of teen beauty and closeted lust.
"The Wolf at the Door," by Jameson Currier. Chelsea Station Editions, 288 pages, $16 paper.
It's not easy to classify Currier's novel. It starts as something of a domestic comedy, with harried New Orleans guesthouse operator Avery Greene Dalrymple III fretting about middle-age decline and the durability of his current relationship, while his former lover, quirky chef Parker, operates a ground-floor Creole restaurant in the genteelly shabby building they co-own. The New Orleans setting leads naturally to spirited spookiness, with supernatural proceedings and ghostly manifestations, including that of a gorgeous young man, the late partner of Max, who is dying of HIV in an upstairs apartment – adding a touch of realistic melancholy to the tale. And the story is also infused with erotic passages worthy of, well, self-stimulation. So let's just classify the novel as really good – a masterful blend of genres that comes together like succulent literary gumbo. Currier's crew of querulous aging queens, offbeat beautiful boys and assorted oddball friends constitute an endearing found family of queers, while the author's historical flashbacks conjure the Big Easy's atmospheric past.
"Handmade Love," by Julie R. Enszer. A Midsummer Night's Press, 64 pages, $11.95 paper.
There is nothing coy about Enszer's poetry. With seductive clarity, she celebrates sexuality – her own, that of other women, and of men. In "First Kiss," she yearns to kiss another teenage girl. In "Jade Ring," she fantasizes about warming a woman's "bold stone" with "my wetness down below." In "Morning Pant," she imagines "the shimmer of gloss from a woman's juices on my chin." And in "Stroke," about her friend Michael's sudden frailty, she writes, "…the only strokes I wish to hear of are the ones that lead inexorably to orgasm." There are politics, too, in these poems: "When We Were Feminists" is a lament for an activism enfeebled by the passage of time. And there is affection for late friends: in "Couplets for Jeff," about a man who died alone at home at 42 and not, as Enszer would have wished, "…mid-orgasm with some little twinkie"; and in "Cunts," dedicated to Tee Corinne, "who enabled me to see lesbian love and cunts in color." There is indeed nothing coy here, and everything that is powerful about poetry.
"Paris in the Spring with Picasso," by Joan Yolleck, illustrations by Marjorie Priceman. Schwartz and Wade, 40 pages, $17.99 hardcover.
It's rather sweet that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are the focal point for a picture book aimed at children aged four to eight. Alas, some bluenoses may well bridle at the fact that their lesbian relationship isn't veiled – they call each other "birdie" and "lovie," are shown arranging flowers, reading together and preparing for their party in domestic bliss, and are identified in a brief bio at the end as lifelong companions. The tale unfolds one Parisian Saturday day and evening, as a handful of artistic luminaries ready themselves for one of Gertrude and Alice's legendary soirees at their 27 rue de Fleurus home. Poet and painter Max Jacob, poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire and painter Pablo Picasso – whose artistic style is skillfully paid homage by Priceman's colorful, airy illustrations – are among the characters whose interactions are imagined by Yolleck in this lovely introduction for kids to the charms of Paris and to the artistic life.
Featured Excerpt
[Doug] saw these people everywhere now, these aging children who had done nothing, borne no responsibility, who in their bootless, liberal refinement would judge him and all he'd done as the enemy of the good and the just, their high-minded opinions just decoration for a different pattern of consumption: the past marketed as the future to comfort the lost. And who financed it? Who loaned them the money for these lives they couldn't quite afford with their credit cards and their student loans? Who else but the banks? And what was he reading? GQ or Men's Health? Some article telling him how to shave his nuts or pluck his eyebrows or sculpt his tender gut?
-from "Union Atlantic," by Adam Haslett
Footnotes
Lesbian poet Ai Ogawa – who changed her name legally from Florence Anthony, and published her books only as "Ai," the Japanese word for love – died March 20 of complications from pneumonia and cancer. She was 62, and lived in Stillwater, Okla., where she taught at Oklahoma State University. She received a National Book Award in 1999 for "Vice"; her other collections are "Cruelty"(published in 1973), "Killing Floor," "Sin" (which won an American Book Award), "Fate," "Greed," and "Dread" – titles that reflected her fierce, unflinching confrontation of life's underside, her fascination with perversity and the existence of evil, and a raw poetic voice that some critics (and women) condemned. "Perhaps Ai's most endearing quality is her complete lack of a polemical voice," critic Jeanette Lee wrote, favorably, about one collection. "This is a poet who writes about necrophilia, incest, rape and murder without condemning what and who has been severely criticized." Her often-brutal poetry, usually written in the form of a dramatic monologue, was informed by both her mixed race heritage – she described herself as "1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish" – and her feminist beliefs. A posthumous collection, "No Surrender," is coming from W.W. Norton in September.
