10 significant books for 2000
I'd like to preface this article by saying that it took me much longer than usual to pick out 10 books released in 2000 that I thought worthy enough to mention; few of them honestly stood out. And since my interests/specialties lie within the entertainment industry, some may find my choices slightly shallow compared to the larger issues facing us these days; so be it. Here they are in no particular order ... .
In gay fiction, the teenage coming out/coming-of-age story has become a hoary tradition verging upon cliché, but two remarkable debut novels breathed fresh life into it: Paul Lisicky's Lawnboy (Turtle Point Press, $13.95) and K.N. Soehnlein's The World of Normal Boys (Kensington Books, $22.00). The former takes place in the dreary confines of present-day suburban Miami as well as the wilder wastelands, where the swamp languidly reclaims asphalt; the fetid environment serves as an apt metaphor for the main character's adolescent angst. The latter places its protagonist in suburban New Jersey in 1978, and beneath the polyester veneer lies a darkly fascinating tale of self-actualization and familial disintegration in a tragedy's wake.
Another cliché—that the entertainment industry holds a particular fascination for gay men—proved true for two novels in which reality and make-believe collide with unpredictable results. In William J. Mann's The Biograph Girl (Kensington Books, $23.00), a journalist discovers that Florence Lawrence, Hollywood's first movie star, faked her suicide and lives in a Buffalo nursing home, aged approximately 106. A thoroughly engaging "what if" premise brings a long-gone Hollywood era back to raucous life, and allows the woman who started it all to transcend her lurid legacy. The Night Listener (HarperCollins, $26.00), Armistead Maupin's long-awaited return to the fold, concerns radio personality Gabriel Noone, who becomes obsessed with discovering whether or not young fan Pete Lomax really exists. By skillfully interweaving parallels of his own life into Gabriel's, Maupin creates a search for truth and reality that satisfies (and vexes) on several levels.
Books like Vanity Fair's Hollywood capture celebrities in perfect, near-iconic poses, but Gary Lee Boas brings the stars down to earth in Starstruck (Dilettante Press, $27.95). A fan of fame and the famous, he's taken 50,000 celeb snapshots over the decades, and his favorite 500 are amassed here. In addition to the artful artlessness of the candids are Boas's remembrances of the days when "fans weren't something ... to avoid."
Conversely, Steven Capsuto's Alternate Channels (Ballantine, $18.00) is a sweeping study of television and radio's portrayals of gays, lesbians and bisexuals over the past 60 years. Breathtaking in scope, it chronicles the evolution of our depiction from shrill comic relief (men) and killers or victims (women) to more well-rounded individuals, and gay characters' surprising proliferation over this past decade.
Since Ellen DeGeneres became one of our most visible representatives, her mother Betty has become a celebrity and role model for unconditional love and acceptance. Her second book, Just a Mom (Alyson, $21.95) is a must-read for parents with gay and lesbian children everywhere as she relates her coming to terms and acceptance with her daughter's sexual orientation. Unfortunately, Ellen and Anne Heche's very public break-up may become more remembered than this fine book.
The Adonis Complex (The Free Press, $25.00) reveals what some of us have known for years: that the health, fitness and beauty industries prey upon (and profit from) men's insecurities, creating a pressure for perfection which some guys will do anything to achieve. While not specifically aimed at a gay readership (indeed, its gay chapter cries out for further study and expansion), this wake-up call to a growing psychological epidemic is perhaps one of this year's most socially "significant" releases.
He's large, he's funny, and lives in Los Angeles. No, it's not John Goodman's character before he returned to Normal, Ohio, but Joel Perry, the author of Funny That Way (Alyson, $12.95). Definitely the odd man out in image-obsessed L.A., he's amused readers of Frontiers and Instinct for quite some time with his hilarious takes on not fitting the gay mould; anyone who reads his "Athletically Challenged: Confessions of a Try-Athlete" without laughing out loud is certifiably humor-impaired. If anyone has a chance of wresting the Best Comedy Lammy from Michael Thomas Ford this year, it's Mr. Perry.
Lastly, we come to a tribute to a fallen icon. In The Stately Homo: A Celebration of the Life of Quentin Crisp (Trafalgar Square, $22.95 or by import from England, Bantam Press L12.99), editor Paul Bailey has assembled a variety of friends, admirers and critics of the late wit and eccentric to present a more well-rounded portrait of the man behind the makeup and flowing cravats. Instead of diminishing Crisp, the less flattering contributions flesh him out. As Andrew Barrow notes, "In the last resort, Quentin Crisp was not a heraldic beast, a mechanical toy, a vehicle for delight, a stopped clock, a stick insect or an anthropomorphic character out of children's fiction, but an immensely lively and real human being."
Two from Two of the Best: Doty and Oliver
Mark Doty, Murano: Glass from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2000), 56 pages; $14.95 (cloth); ISBN: 0-89236-598-6 Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem (Da Capo Press, 2000), 64 pages; $22.00 (cloth); ISBN: 0306809931
by Yvonne Zipter
What does it mean that two of our most preeminent contemporary queer poets should both come out with single-poem volumes in the same month in the same year? I can't imagine it's anything more than a marvelous coincidence, but it does seem remarkable that both Mark Doty and Mary Oliver should have done just that.
Another similarity between the two books is that they are both (or seem to be) written for someone dear to each of them—in Doty's case, his friend, the poet Lynda Hull, who died in a car accident a number of years ago, and in Oliver's case, her long-time partner, to whom the book is dedicated. From there, though, one can start counting the differences: Doty's book—an art book, really—features photos of glass pieces from the Getty Museum with the lines of his poem superimposed at the edges of the images; Oliver's book is a more standard text-on-white-paper affair.
Doty's poem is broken by nothing more than stanzas, while Oliver's poem is broken into named sections, which are further broken into numbered sections, which are in turn sometimes broken into multiple stanzas. Doty's overt subject is of the manmade world, whereas Oliver's is primarily the natural world. Doty's poem is beautiful, complex, and multilayered; Oliver's poem is often self-conscious and abstract and only occasionally shows flashes of her usual brilliance.
When Oliver is talking about the particulars of the natural world, she is at her best—"the green pea / climbs the stake / on her sugary muscles" or "Once / in the woods / snake came / like a whip / like a piece of circle / like black water / flowing down the hill." There are moments, too, when Oliver is wholly in the world of humans that shine: "Bless the hips / for they are cunning beyond all other machinery." But much of this long, seven-part poem does not seem up to Oliver's usual standard, wallowing in abstraction ("I will sing for the veil that never lifts. / I will sing for the veil that begins, once in a lifetime, / maybe, to life. / I will sing for the rent in the veil," and so on) or getting lost in long catalogs, some of which are decidedly Whitmanesque but many of which lapse into sentimentality and with no clear context for the slender connections apparently being made (e.g., "first child / speaking its first words / first peach on the tree / first grapes / first hand-holding").
In the end, a poem should exhibit some sense of unity, and "The Leaf and the Cloud" seems to hover somewhere between a love poem and a leave-taking, with its many references to death and long lists of good-byes ("Think of me / when you see the evening star. / Think of me when you see the wren"). Let's hope this is not, in fact, Mary Oliver literally saying good-bye to the world; among other things, I cannot accept that this is the best epitaph she can write for herself.
In what stark contrast, then, Mark Doty's little poem/book Murano stands from The Leaf and the Cloud. The images of the poem are fresh and crisp, the details scrupulous and lush, and he weaves together the two topics of his poem—Murano glass (and the city it comes from, Venice) and his friend Lynda Hull—almost seamlessly: "Is this / what becomes of art, / the hard-won permanence / outside of time? A struck / match-head of a city, / ungodly lonely / in its patina of fumes / and ash? Gorgeous scrap heap / where no one lives, / or hardly anyone. / Did you have to burn / so harshly bright? / Wasn't the world / ruin enough?"
As for the photographs of the glass, one might suspect that they could be a disruption of or a distraction from the text. But in fact, the effect is to make one read the poem more slowly and to savor it in small, bite-sized pieces. And anyway, taken at very close range and focusing on only an edge or base or handle rather than on a piece as a whole, the photographic images provide something more like a dreamy, surrealistic backdrop than a realistic representation of a specific object.
Of the two books, then, Doty's is clearly the one to buy if you have a limited budget and cannot afford both. Yet Oliver's book, despite the qualms I've expressed, is not without its merits and charms, and both books would make thoughtful presents for someone you cherish, suffused as each of them is with a sense of love and of awe for the world, its creatures, and the things of their making.
Copyright © 2001 Lambda Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Lambda publishes Windy City Times, The Weekly Voice of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Community, Nightlines, Out Resource Guide, Clout! Business Report, Blacklines and En La Vida. 1115 W. Belmont 2D, Chicago, IL 60657; PH (773) 871-7610; FAX (773) 871-7609. Web at outlineschicago.com E-mail feedback to outlines@suba.com!
