Not "AIDS Fiction," Not "Gay Fiction," but Great Fiction, Period. Just Follow the Horses!
Written: Jul 04 '01 (Updated Jul 09 '01)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: A triumph of contemporary mythmaking, and an endearing, loving read.
Cons: Mismarketed as another novel about AIDS, which it is not.
The Bottom Line: A realistic and yet mythic novel with echoes of Faulkner and Homer. Ignore the plot-summaries, and read as though riding a horse.
|
|
|
| Urbanist's Full Review: Tom Spanbauer - In the City of Shy Hunters: A Nove... |
"I write," Tom Spanbauer likes to say, "because I can't speak and cry at the same time."
For ten difficult years since he published his breakthrough novel, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, Spanbauer has been writing only for that reason. Now, this labor of tears has come together into novel that rises above mere hope and anger to walk the tightrope of contemporary myth. In the City of Shy Hunters invites comparison to the greatest American mythmaker, William Faulkner. Literati like to lament that Faulkner could never break into print today; we are lucky that Spanbauer still can.
Sadly, the prevailing marketing of this book makes it sound like a tired retrodding of well-trodden ground: yet another novel about young men dying of AIDS before they knew what hit them. The dust-jacket blurb drearily summarizes this plot -- as though trying to make the book sound identical to any of fifteen others.
Even the author, trying to sum up the work a year before it appeared, told me that it was about a diverse group of people in New York in the early years of AIDS. This is true as far as it goes, but it is not why you should read the book, and it risks being a reason that you won't.
To call this an AIDS novel is wrong even as plot-summary, and it's certainly a misleading description of what this book does . So please, throw away the dust jacket (unless you want to save the photo of the handsome and -- last I checked -- eligible author).
Yes, this novel is set in Manhattan in the early days of AIDS. Yes, its central figures are mostly gay and bisexual men facing the onslaught of the plague. Yes, it's hero is a young man fleeing an abusive childhood in the fake-Native world of an Idaho reservation. And yet none of these plot-strands is enough to jam this surprising novel into a genre. This is not an AIDS novel. It is not a child-abuse novel. It is not a gay novel. It is not even a Native American novel, though the hero and the author are both of Native descent.
With a few exceptions, Spanbauer avoids the bathos of so much of the well-intentioned and deeply felt literature of AIDS. He does this by rendering his tale on the level of myth, a level where homophobia, racism, homelessness, and the Native American genocide all come together as expressions of the same evil. The plague is all plagues, and the battle of the homeless against the police is also Wounded Knee.
As the book opens, the hero, "William of Heaven," arrives in a hateful, squalid Lower East Side, looking for lover and comrade from his Idaho childhood that he believes is somewhere in the city. This goal, Homeric in its purity, makes him a winning and lovable protagonist, even as his "Odyssey" threatens to become an "Iliad."
He quickly learns the arts of coping in Koch-era New York, first by learning the style that Spanbauer calls "New York drop dead f*ck you." In a beautifully-turned laundromat scene, the kind-hearted William stares down several older women to win the single available drier. He leaves with the confidence that he can be as rude as New York requires, without becoming mean in his heart. Spanbauer's William may be naive in New York, but he is already wise to the world, and he is obsessed with speaking truth even when fear and hope both call on him to lie.
Spanbauer offers us many of the familiar reference points of New York literature: squalor rendered with painterly detail, rudeness as a universal discourse, hierarchies of Proustian subtlety, conceptual theatre in tenement basements. Yet all these old facts of life become new as Spanbauer's unusual young hero endures them for the first time. Even the most jaded New Yorker will find a surprising point of view somewhere in this book. If nothing else, just follow the horses.
The novel is full of them: the horses of William's childhood, the horses of his dreams, horses under the donut-enriched butts of police. Horses as metaphors in the ride of life, or in the ride of reading.
We have many words to describe a repeated phrase or motif in fiction; Spanbauer's own pet term is "horse." As you read (or ride) a story, repetitions land like your horse's footfalls. They reassure you that you are still heading the right way, that you haven't run off a cliff, and that while the landscape around you is changing, you are still in the same story. You may not know where you're going, but your horse does.
The underlying horse-ride of this book lies in a singsong repetition reminiscent of Homer. Phrases come back over and over, the reliable hoofbeats of this galloping narrative:
"All Dodges sound the same when you start them up."
"Every time you hear a car alarm ... another New Yorker has gone to hell."
"Your going this way and then sh*t happens and you're going that way."
The last of these, of course, is the plot in a sentence. But the more open-ended footfalls of the narrative horse are worth our attention on every page, for much of the story happens in their subtle modulation. In the City of Shy Hunters is as delicate and tender as its title. It deserves to be read not as part of any genre, but as a great and loving book.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
|
|
Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.