Written by Andrew W. M. Beierle, 336 pages, $15
REVIEW BY YASMIN NAIR
A 2007 J. Crew catalog cover featured two women who looked like conjoined twins, pressing closely to each other. They weren't, of course, really joined; even consumerist fantasies can only go so far.
The image spoke to our conflicting emotions about conjoined twins, who've always evoked a mixture of horror, erotic fascination and curiosity about technical details. How do they do 'it,' we wonder. By 'it,' we mean sex. Even after death, their bodies are fetishized and labeled as medical anomalies. The now politically incorrect term for them was 'Siamese twins,' after Chang and Eng Bunker, whose liver, their only shared organ, is displayed at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum. Twin Falls Idaho, a 1999 film about a pair of conjoined twins, depicted them as beautiful, if tragic and doomed young men.
In Andrew Beierle's evocative novel, First Person Plural, Owen and Porter Jamison are conjoined twins who reject the role of tragic anomalies and live complex and literally entangled lives. They share a single body with one torso, two heads, two necks, three lungs, two gall bladders, two stomachs, a single penis and two hearts. Or, as Owen emphasizes: ' … two very different hearts.'
Owen is quiet and reserved, and Porter outgoing and popular. Beierle assiduously details each brother's uniqueness, a hard task given that Porter and Owen share so much and that the latter is the narrator. Any possible economic issues are resolved by the fact that their parents are well off; the men attend college and even form a successful two-man rock band named Janus. This is not a spectacular novel, but it is a carefully crafted one, and with a great deal of subtle humor that's a refreshing change from the usual faux-campy Will-and-Grace hyperactivity of some of today's gay fiction.
Their first sexual experience is at the hands and mouth of a groupie who's cheered on by her roommate when she goes down on them as they lie half-drunk on a couch. Porter is ecstatic, but Owen is ashamed of what he calls a 'tawdry' experience. Where one feels pleasure, the other only experiences revulsion, and their responses define their separateness from each other: Owen is gay, Porter is straight. We often read about gay twins and gay men with straight twins. First Person Plural asks what it means to be both gay and straight in the same body.
Beierle vividly evokes Owen's deeply unhappy interior life as he struggles to understand both his sexuality and his twinness. As a child, he relates, he loved the Doublemint gum commercial, ' … and every time I saw two people kiss on TV, I turned and kissed Porter, who usually started to cry and eventually responded by hitting me.' As he sees it, his delight in what he saw as self-images helped him survive the realization ' … that existence is a solitary thing in our world … while lovers may look a lot like Porter and me when they kiss, they inevitably part.'
Matters get complicated when Porter marries Faith, and when Owen and her brother Chase find themselves attracted to each other. The novel ends with a quietly beautiful closing line that promises as much as it questions.
Yasmin Nair can be reached at welshzen@yahoo.com . She also blogs at bilerico.com .