Yes Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage
Jan. 4th, 2024 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1I finished this book yesterday and I want to rant about it!
First of all, on reading this book, I got the impression that there was a TON of hype about it. If so, I totally missed it. I found it slotted into a B&N bookcase (not even on display), the only copy available, and thought, "Well, it's obviously gay so let's give it a try." I liked the dark plot description on the back: Jonah, a broke aspiring playwright in NYC, becomes involved with Richard, a celebrated gay writer who's old enough to be Jonah's dad. Obvious set-up for a sticky, abusive situation. The cover and title suggested a cheeky, campy treatment and I was all-aboard.
(Dude, this book is stuffed with evidence that it was highly-promoted. There's a reader discussion guide in the back! An interview with the author! A little blurb saying that upon publication it had ALREADY been optioned for an Amazon TV show! And to top it all off, it was Parks-Ramage's debut.)
Well, okay, here's a quick plot description.
It starts with a prologue. Our main character sits on a witness stand. He's supposed to testify about the rape and abuse he suffered at Richard's hands. He's doing this to help an unnamed young man who is suing Richard for similar rape and abuse, but on the stand, Jonah changes his mind last-minute and instead testifies that Richard was a loving boyfriend who never hurt anybody.
Cut to 2008.
Jonah, 25, is a Bible Belt escapee with a master's in play-writing. We find out early in the book that he's a recent survivor of conversion therapy too -- not NEARLY early enough, imo, because it made me do a double-take, and I was like, "Whoa, this guy's GOT to have a ton of trauma left over from that. Where is it??" (No, Amado, calm down. Save the criticism for later.) If you've read the book you're probably thinking, "Dude, he's got trauma out the wazoo" and I CAN SEE WHY YOU'D SAY THAT. When we meet Jonah, he's selfish, manipulative, and making god-awful choices. Every two weeks he manipulates his mother into sending him $500-$1000, which he promptly spends on ridiculously expensive designer clothes, specifically so he can someday meet the celebrity he's stalking (Richard) while nicely-dressed, and manipulate him into a relationship. This sort of Killing Stalking-level dysfunction in a protagonist is delicious to me. But in Killing Stalking it's deliberate, it's deeply explored, and it's tied to Yoon-Bum's past trauma. In "Yes Daddy", Jonah's current bad behavior seems weirdly disconnected from his recent trauma, like the two aren't connected at all. You get the sense that this is just how Jonah is. Fine, that can be interesting too. Look at "Trainspotting." Flawed protagonists can "just be that way" and still be interesting. But they have to have an internal world. What does JONAH think about the fact that he cruelly manipulates a loving mom? Does he ever have a flash of self-awareness when he's cyber-stalking Richard and making notes on what to say when they meet?
I don't get the sense, as a reader, that he does. It's more like Jonah's behavior Just Happens, and then plot Just Happens too, and occasionally we get flat exposition that tells us past trauma Just Happened once upon a time. The emotional connection between these events just isn't there.
Anyway.
Jonah works at a Hooters-style gay restaurant where he is groped by guests and mistreated by his boss. He spends his free time obsessively reading up on Richard Shriver and writing "Notes for Future Conversations," a collection of practice-dialogues that will help him manipulate Richard into loving him. Jonah has fixated on Richard solely because of a photo he happened to see: Richard at a fancy event, with a boy-toy sitting in his lap. The boy-toy was so irrelevant to high society that they didn't even bother to name him in the caption. Richard assesses this photo, determines that he's more handsome, and thinks, "I can be that boy-toy."
Ugh! It sounds so interesting in summary, but...
Soon Jonah has wormed his way into Richard's life. They have sex; they start dating. Richard showers him with expensive dinners and exclusive invitations to crazy events, like a private tour of the MoMA. (A brief explanation of where Richard's wealth comes from would have been good here. It's not until much later that we learn Richard isn't simply a playwright in NYC; he's a playwright whose plays have been adapted into Oscar-winning films, and who has written at least one hit TV show. The lack of explanation had me scratching my head early in the novel. Being a playwright doesn't automatically make you filthy rich just because you're 50 instead of 25. He would realistically be just as broke as Jonah, struggling just as hard, even with a few critical successes under his belt).
Richard invites Jonah to the opening night of his new play, which he says will explain his own mommy issues perfectly. But the day of the premiere, Richard is antsy and snappish, and out of nowhere, he slaps a perfectly-sweet-and-supportive Jonah in the face. Jonah is shocked and apologizes automatically, as if he did something to deserve it (I liked that part; it felt real to me). The play features a gay man who must confront the incestuous abuse he suffered from his mother. Richard's real mother sits in attendance, her face drawn in disapproval. Afterward, Richard hotly denies that the play was based on real life and gaslights Jonah, pretending he never said any such thing.
The quickness with which we moved from Richard the Hot Rich Boyfriend to Richard the Abuser disappointed me. Not that I wanted the author to drag it out -- but the descent into abuse CAN be riveting to read, and I think Parks-Ramage realized that he wasn't up to the task. So he didn't write a descent. He wrote Richard the Hot Rich Boyfriend for one singular date, their first date; then he wrote a quick paragraph listing some cool dates they went on, and then he hopped straight into Richard the Abuser. But it turned out Parks-Ramage had little interest in exploring Richard the Abuser either. What he really wanted to write was, uh, Richard the... Supervillain?
Richard takes Jonah with him to his house in the Hamptons. There, Richard lives in a compound with four other famous creatives: four glass houses stand together on a remote property. There's Sandro, a critically-acclaimed filmmaker; Charles, a filthy-rich producer and Richard's ex-boyfriend; and Ira and Ethel, a married couple who design costumes for the films that Richard writes and Charles produces and Sandro directs. The five of them are waited on by a group of bland, identical gay waiters in tight black shirts.
One of those waiters is familiar. He's Evan, the smug boy-toy from the photo Jonah saw. Evan, it turns out, hasn't been discarded. He's working as a "butler" at Richard's house -- although he doesn't wear the same uniform as the other waitstaff. He wears his own skimpy clothes, teases Richard, insults Charles and Sandro, studies Jonah with distaste, and seems confident, disdainful, and regal as he goes about his 'butler duties.' This all unnerves the hell out of Jonah. What the fuck is Evan's actual relationship to Richard? Why does he call himself Mrs. Danvers? (Jonah apparently did a masters in writing but never read Du Maurier).
God, anyway, I won't belabor the point. At the Hamptons, Jonah is cruelly teased and subtly insulted by Richard's older friends. He's treated as a disposable toy. Once, blackout drunk, he finds himself outside some strange garden shed-type structure with Charles, and he thinks Charles might have raped him, but he can't be sure, and he decides not to think about it. It's Evan who rescues him, and it's not like he's gonna ask Evan to fill in the blacked-out details. Not much later, we meet Mace Miller, a 16-year-old child star who is Sandro's "boyfriend." Mace is flirty and seems to enjoy the drugs and sexual attention from older men. The night that he visits is when things get truly over-the-top goofy. Jonah is drugged and led to the aforementioned garden shed, where Richard and his friends reveal a trap door in the floor. Below is a sex dungeon. They usher Jonah, Mace, and the entire waitstaff inside and what follows is a deliriously goofy BDSM/torture/gang rape scene where every old man apparently has the stamina to fuck every single young man multiple times.
The next day Richard plies Jonah with career opportunities and more extravagant gifts to stop him from leaving. He buys Jonah $3000+ in designer clothes and promises to pay Jonah's rent if he quits his job. Jonah is grateful. He likes the idea of being Richard's kept boy as he works on his new play ("Notes on Future Conversations" -- he's turned his stalker notes into a play by writing down the real interactions between himself and Richard). But the new play rings inauthentic and frustrates Jonah, and one night he deletes it all and instead writes an embarrassing dialogue between his character and Richard's, where Jonah scolds Richard for abusing him and ends his diatribe with "die die die die die DIE DIE DIE DIE."
Then, because apparently he was drunk while doing this, Jonah passes out. He wakes up to find Richard reading the play. Richard cheerfully closes the laptop and reminds Jonah that they reservations at a fancy restaurant. On the ride there, he remains upbeat and sweet. But at the restaurant, he tells Jonah they need to break up. It's not about the play -- he understands that the play is fictional. It's just that he and Jonah are in totally different life paths right now and their relationship can't last. Of course, Jonah is free to stay at the compound, he doesn't have to leave. In fact, Jonah's not allowed to leave. Because Jonah owes Richard $2000 for the rent Richard paid, and $3000 for the designer clothes.
Jonah's flabbergasted and indignant but ... he doesn't really put up a fight. Richard proposes that Jonah join the waitstaff. They sleep in the garden shed (free room and board!) and are paid $200 per week, which will of course be confiscated by Richard until Jonah's debt is paid. After he makes $5000, he can even stay on at the compound and keep working until he's saved enough money to leave! How great!
Jonah just...agrees. He has $50 in his pocket, which in 2008, when the book takes place, was DEFINITELY enough money for a train ticket outta there. But then what would he do? he asks himself. Go back to New York and just be homeless? No way. Indentured servitude is obviously the way to go. Oh, have I mentioned that at this point RICHARD HAS MURDERED EVAN??? AND JONAH HEARD IT HAPPENING?? AND HE STILL AGREES TO STAY?
It's not even that he THINKS of Evan's weird off-screen bizarrely-unaffecting murder and goes, "God, Rich will kill me if I try to leave. I have no choice." He doesn't think of the murder he overheard at all, he's just like, "Geez it would suck to go back home with no cash." So Jonah meekly returns to the compound and joins the waitstaff. Up until this point, he and Mace Miller had been friends -- the two upcoming protegees with rich, abusive boyfriends. They had solidarity. But now Jonah is the servant and Mace is still the beloved child star. He immediately grows to resent Mace, uh, seemingly with no awareness of the fact that Mace is a child who has known and worked with his "boyfriend" since he was eight...
Richard's mom comes over for a birthday celebration. She's especially critical, and she leaves when Richard's incest play is brought up. She sort-of kind-of confirms that she did molest Richard before she goes, and afterward, Richard begs Mace to wear a blonde bob wig, his mother's hairstyle, and do an impersonation. Mace won't do it, so Jonah does, and uses the opportunity to mock Richard. When Richard begs to hear "I love you," from his mom, Jonah-as-Mommy spits, "I don't love you, I just fucked you," and a furious Richard knocks him unconscious. Jonah wakes groggily to see Mace, in the wig, getting fucked by Richard on the floor.
This is unironically the best scene in the novel. Maybe the ONLY good scene. I was actually interested in ALL of this. But it's worth noting that at this point Jonah has decided that his only way out is to kill Richard in self-defense. He's been trying to provoke Richard all night and now he has his chance. He can say he was defending a child, I guess (Jonah himself does NOT THINK THIS and it's not clear why he sees THIS moment as a good opportunity to claim self-defense, since he's not being hurt). (Also, yes, Jonah did consider escape and even found a great escape route, but when the other waiters refused to come with him, he decided to do murder instead).
Spoiler alert: Jonah doesn't kill Richard. He fucks up his attack. The resulting fight ends up with a waiter badly injured, maybe even dying, and a panicked Richard shoves the corpse into a car and orders Mace and Jonah to take him elsewhere. "He can't die here!"
Mace and Jonah take the waiter to the hospital. They evade questions and lie about what happened, and where, and apparently they don't ring any alarm bells by doing so -- the police never get involved or anything. But in the hospital lobby, Mace takes a few $20s from his pocket and gives them to Jonah, urging him to run.
This time Jonah does. Why is it different this time, to leave with a scarce amount of cash?? I don't know!! He was already getting gang raped and tortured the LAST time he refused to leave with just a pocketful of cash! When he developed his escape plan and then decided against it, it was because the other waiters were like, "Dude, you'll just be homeless when you get to NYC." What makes him change his mind? He seems emotionally unaffected by Mace's rape and Chase the waiter's near-death. Those are things that Just Happened in Jonah's vicinity, not thing that affected him. So...???
He takes the cash, he gets a train, he goes back to his mom's house, he mooches off her for a while and then steals $400 from her and goes...back...to NYC.... ??? After a week in a hostel, he returns to his waiter job and begs for it back. As this section of the novel wraps up, we learn that the character from the prologue, the one who sued Richard for rape/abuse, was in fact Mace Miller -- that Mace gathered the courage to tell the world what happened to him in 2011, that Jonah promised to help him bring Richard down but then chickened out for reasons unknown.
OK. Part 2. Flash forward to 2018, the #MeToo era. Jonah is a staff writer for some gossip rag, and former child star Mace Miller has just had a meth-fueled breakdown where he dressed in drag (including the blonde bob wig) and punched a Denny's cashier for not giving him 100 packs of honey. (This sequence, like the Mommy sequence, also interested me, but wasn't used to its full potential). Jonah's boss asks him to write about the breakdown, but Jonah refuses. Soon after, #MeToo really picks up steam and Jonah gets the scoop on a famous Hollywood producer who molested a series of male child stars. He establishes a rapport with one of the victims and convinces the boy to come forward publicly and act as a spokesperson for the movement.
Incidentally, this means that Jonah is manipulating a young rape victim SOLELY AND EXPLICITLY to propel his own career forward and make a profit off the kid's abuse. That's FASCINATING. But it is never addressed or explored, and again, it seems to be an event that Just Happens, not an event that says anything about Jonah as a character or deserves examination.
As Jonah makes $$$ from other people's abuse, he worries that someone will dig up his own #MeToo moment. Especially since Mace Miller is in the news all the time for his breakdown. Mace was dismissed as a liar at the time, but that was years ago; it's only a matter of time before someone remembers and reexamines Mace in the light of #MeToo. After telling us what's inevitable, the author then writes the inevitable. Jonah is exposed by a TikTok-type celebrity who unearths his old testimony in support of Richard and speculates that Jonah was Richard's accomplice, procuring young boys for the pedophile parties.
As Jonah's career crumbles, he ... falls in... with a cult. Uh. Like he's miserable, suicidal. He falls down drunk in the street and a beautiful teenage girl picks him up and guides him to this "church," where he's enraptured by the hot, obviously-gay preacher. Jonah is vulnerable and feels an intense spiritual awakening and ends up on yet another compound, this time with a bunch of damaged, desperate minorities who have been sucked in by this church. He testifies about his abuse at Richard's hands onstage and is assured that if he just stays celibate, God will forgive him for being gay. Jonah, a BIBLE BELT GAY WHO WENT TO CONVERSION THERAPY, has apparently never heard this before, and is amazed! He agrees to be celibate, only to be raped by the hot gay preacher who told him to stay celibate in the first place.
Sigh. Jonah leaves the cult. He emails Mace (how does he have Mace's email??) an apology, and posts a public article about why he testified for Richard, where he comes clean about the abuse and rape. Mace forgives him and urges Jonah to get therapy, and I'll be honest, Mace's return email was the ONLY part of the book where dialogue struck me as natural and authentic. But the very same night, Mace gets methed up again and kills himself in his mom's bathtub.
(...This was not handled well by the author. I mean, Mace's letter to Jonah shows us a mature, settled young man who has gotten away from Hollywood, healed his relationship with his mom, and kicked his addictions. He's down-to-earth, compassionate, and extremely wise. But mere hours after sending Jonah that email, he relapses and kills himself. Again, this is an idea that COULD work EXTREMELY well, but the writer just wasn't talented enough to pull it off. He contrasts the most genuine moment of the book with an immediate, inauthentic-feeling reversal).
Sigh sigh sigh. Okay. So Jonah is wrecked by this and uh, somehow ends up reconnecting with his dad. The thing about Jonah's dad is, as we learn very early on in the book, he's a Bible Belt megachurch preacher. He's rabidly homophobic. When he finds out Jonah (age 21) is chatting with men online, he sends Jonah to conversion therapy for a whole year. Jonah's therapist tries desperately to find the root of Jonah's homosexuality and eventually convinces Jonah that he must have been molested by a man. Jonah and his therapist work to "uncover repressed memories," and Jonah accuses his father (falsely) of molesting him. Dad is abandoned by the church (UNREALISTIC), and the very same night that he's accused, he empties his bank accounts and disappears.
This is in part why Jonah's treatment of his mother rankles readers so badly. Jonah's mom stays. She works two jobs to make ends meet, while Jonah himself refuses to get a job, believing that if he becomes employed, he'll be tied to the Bible Belt forever. His mom puts him through grad school and sends him money in NYC, she accepts him back with open arms when he's traumatized, and this asshole steals from her! But I digress. Late in the book, Jonah's dad wants to meet up. It turns out that when Daddy left, he went back to his own father's Depression-era strawberry farm and became a field worker. Daddy and Granddaddy had a tense relationship that got worse when Granddaddy got Alzheimer's (and eventually died). But the harshness of that relationship made Daddy realize what a dick he'd been to Jonah. He reformed himself and started attending ex-evangelical support groups in Chicago. (He explicitly says the ex-vangelicals were mostly gay people who had been oppressed by the church -- they didn't feel uncomfortable with a straight ex-preacher who sent his son to conversion therapy in their group? Was that really the healthiest way to heal for them all? I don't know...)
The support group eventually became a pro-gay church, and now the dad preaches there. Jonah goes to live with his dad, joins the church, and finds peace and God again. His mother emails them to say she's now a rabid homophobe herself and wants nothing to do with them. The End.
(deep breath)
This book was like, 200 pages long, guys. It was NOT long enough to show a happy relationship delve into an abusive one while ALSO tackling Richard's incest trauma, Jonah's kinship with Mace Miller, Jonah's fucked-up relationships with his mom and dad. It DEFINITELY wasn't long enough to tackle all of the above while also introducing a nefarious ring of gay rapists with a secret torture dungeon in the Hamptons, and also a rapey Christian cult, and also a healing strawberry farm and pro-gay church. Even a skilled writer would struggle to juggle those elements and do them all justice (if you accept the premise that these are good ideas and SHOULD be juggled at all).
Parks-Ramage, as a writer... he's not bad. Honestly. He's competent. He's had a lot of writing gigs in his life and it shows. He knows how to string a sentence together. But he's by no means an interesting writer. This plot is stuffed full of potentially interesting ideas, and Parks-Ramage isn't equipped to handle them. Each new element is delivered in the form of flat exposition. Dialogue is bland, immemorable, with zero surprises. No character ever surprises me, actually; nor do I ever get that pleasantly-surprised "wow!" moment while reading a particularly beautiful sentence or impactful snippet of dialogue. Also, I can't help but pick this bone: why do we need to constantly devote entire pages to the most dull subjects in this book?? Paragraph after paragraph describes Jonah's budget during his escape from the Hamptons. "I had $200 from Mace and I spent $100 on a train ticket to NYC and then the hostel was $40 a night and I spent $10 on food each day at the bodega--" LOOK, I JUST SUMMED IT UP INTO ONE SENTENCE, and even THAT sentence is so long and boring that it ought to be cut!
The characters really seem like cardboard cut-outs -- broad strokes of common stereotypes. Richard's most interesting trait is that he was apparently molested by his mom, but outside of the Mace rape scene, it's never explored. And that one scene is not enough to justify including incest as a plot point, imo. Not saying that you have to justify incest specifically, but that you have to justify EVERY plot point -- you have to treat your plot points with respect, think about them seriously, explore them to the full extent. If you fail to do that with ANY plot point then your book immediately becomes shakier.
Jonah, unlike Richard, is stuffed with potentially interesting traits. He falsely accused his dad of molestation. He only just recently went to conversion therapy. He's manipulative, selfish, vain, a little cutthroat. But all these things are written, somehow, so blandly, that Jonah is immensely boring to read. In the back of the book, Parks-Ramage talks about Jonah. He admits that many early readers considered Jonah to be too unsympathetic. Parks-Ramage contends that Jonah is MEANT to be unsympathetic. He wanted to explore unsympathetic, imperfect victims.
Reading this made it all click for me about why Jonah doesn't work. Parks-Ramage really didn't set out to write a person; he set out to write an unsympathetic victim specifically so he could make an Important Point. This is why it seems like all of Jonah's actions Just Happen, coincidentally, without any impact on him -- because Parks-Ramage isn't interested in the bare-minimum work of exploring Jonah's personality. Those things are PURELY there to establish that not all victims are angels, And They Deserve Justice Anyway.
Me, to a friend: "[explains the plot]"
My friend: "Why can't people just write good books"
My friend: "pro gay churches are such copouts. I think i could write a book better than this."
My friend: "Me too movement was a cancer on literature"
First of all, on reading this book, I got the impression that there was a TON of hype about it. If so, I totally missed it. I found it slotted into a B&N bookcase (not even on display), the only copy available, and thought, "Well, it's obviously gay so let's give it a try." I liked the dark plot description on the back: Jonah, a broke aspiring playwright in NYC, becomes involved with Richard, a celebrated gay writer who's old enough to be Jonah's dad. Obvious set-up for a sticky, abusive situation. The cover and title suggested a cheeky, campy treatment and I was all-aboard.
(Dude, this book is stuffed with evidence that it was highly-promoted. There's a reader discussion guide in the back! An interview with the author! A little blurb saying that upon publication it had ALREADY been optioned for an Amazon TV show! And to top it all off, it was Parks-Ramage's debut.)
Well, okay, here's a quick plot description.
It starts with a prologue. Our main character sits on a witness stand. He's supposed to testify about the rape and abuse he suffered at Richard's hands. He's doing this to help an unnamed young man who is suing Richard for similar rape and abuse, but on the stand, Jonah changes his mind last-minute and instead testifies that Richard was a loving boyfriend who never hurt anybody.
Cut to 2008.
Jonah, 25, is a Bible Belt escapee with a master's in play-writing. We find out early in the book that he's a recent survivor of conversion therapy too -- not NEARLY early enough, imo, because it made me do a double-take, and I was like, "Whoa, this guy's GOT to have a ton of trauma left over from that. Where is it??" (No, Amado, calm down. Save the criticism for later.) If you've read the book you're probably thinking, "Dude, he's got trauma out the wazoo" and I CAN SEE WHY YOU'D SAY THAT. When we meet Jonah, he's selfish, manipulative, and making god-awful choices. Every two weeks he manipulates his mother into sending him $500-$1000, which he promptly spends on ridiculously expensive designer clothes, specifically so he can someday meet the celebrity he's stalking (Richard) while nicely-dressed, and manipulate him into a relationship. This sort of Killing Stalking-level dysfunction in a protagonist is delicious to me. But in Killing Stalking it's deliberate, it's deeply explored, and it's tied to Yoon-Bum's past trauma. In "Yes Daddy", Jonah's current bad behavior seems weirdly disconnected from his recent trauma, like the two aren't connected at all. You get the sense that this is just how Jonah is. Fine, that can be interesting too. Look at "Trainspotting." Flawed protagonists can "just be that way" and still be interesting. But they have to have an internal world. What does JONAH think about the fact that he cruelly manipulates a loving mom? Does he ever have a flash of self-awareness when he's cyber-stalking Richard and making notes on what to say when they meet?
I don't get the sense, as a reader, that he does. It's more like Jonah's behavior Just Happens, and then plot Just Happens too, and occasionally we get flat exposition that tells us past trauma Just Happened once upon a time. The emotional connection between these events just isn't there.
Anyway.
Jonah works at a Hooters-style gay restaurant where he is groped by guests and mistreated by his boss. He spends his free time obsessively reading up on Richard Shriver and writing "Notes for Future Conversations," a collection of practice-dialogues that will help him manipulate Richard into loving him. Jonah has fixated on Richard solely because of a photo he happened to see: Richard at a fancy event, with a boy-toy sitting in his lap. The boy-toy was so irrelevant to high society that they didn't even bother to name him in the caption. Richard assesses this photo, determines that he's more handsome, and thinks, "I can be that boy-toy."
Ugh! It sounds so interesting in summary, but...
Soon Jonah has wormed his way into Richard's life. They have sex; they start dating. Richard showers him with expensive dinners and exclusive invitations to crazy events, like a private tour of the MoMA. (A brief explanation of where Richard's wealth comes from would have been good here. It's not until much later that we learn Richard isn't simply a playwright in NYC; he's a playwright whose plays have been adapted into Oscar-winning films, and who has written at least one hit TV show. The lack of explanation had me scratching my head early in the novel. Being a playwright doesn't automatically make you filthy rich just because you're 50 instead of 25. He would realistically be just as broke as Jonah, struggling just as hard, even with a few critical successes under his belt).
Richard invites Jonah to the opening night of his new play, which he says will explain his own mommy issues perfectly. But the day of the premiere, Richard is antsy and snappish, and out of nowhere, he slaps a perfectly-sweet-and-supportive Jonah in the face. Jonah is shocked and apologizes automatically, as if he did something to deserve it (I liked that part; it felt real to me). The play features a gay man who must confront the incestuous abuse he suffered from his mother. Richard's real mother sits in attendance, her face drawn in disapproval. Afterward, Richard hotly denies that the play was based on real life and gaslights Jonah, pretending he never said any such thing.
The quickness with which we moved from Richard the Hot Rich Boyfriend to Richard the Abuser disappointed me. Not that I wanted the author to drag it out -- but the descent into abuse CAN be riveting to read, and I think Parks-Ramage realized that he wasn't up to the task. So he didn't write a descent. He wrote Richard the Hot Rich Boyfriend for one singular date, their first date; then he wrote a quick paragraph listing some cool dates they went on, and then he hopped straight into Richard the Abuser. But it turned out Parks-Ramage had little interest in exploring Richard the Abuser either. What he really wanted to write was, uh, Richard the... Supervillain?
Richard takes Jonah with him to his house in the Hamptons. There, Richard lives in a compound with four other famous creatives: four glass houses stand together on a remote property. There's Sandro, a critically-acclaimed filmmaker; Charles, a filthy-rich producer and Richard's ex-boyfriend; and Ira and Ethel, a married couple who design costumes for the films that Richard writes and Charles produces and Sandro directs. The five of them are waited on by a group of bland, identical gay waiters in tight black shirts.
One of those waiters is familiar. He's Evan, the smug boy-toy from the photo Jonah saw. Evan, it turns out, hasn't been discarded. He's working as a "butler" at Richard's house -- although he doesn't wear the same uniform as the other waitstaff. He wears his own skimpy clothes, teases Richard, insults Charles and Sandro, studies Jonah with distaste, and seems confident, disdainful, and regal as he goes about his 'butler duties.' This all unnerves the hell out of Jonah. What the fuck is Evan's actual relationship to Richard? Why does he call himself Mrs. Danvers? (Jonah apparently did a masters in writing but never read Du Maurier).
God, anyway, I won't belabor the point. At the Hamptons, Jonah is cruelly teased and subtly insulted by Richard's older friends. He's treated as a disposable toy. Once, blackout drunk, he finds himself outside some strange garden shed-type structure with Charles, and he thinks Charles might have raped him, but he can't be sure, and he decides not to think about it. It's Evan who rescues him, and it's not like he's gonna ask Evan to fill in the blacked-out details. Not much later, we meet Mace Miller, a 16-year-old child star who is Sandro's "boyfriend." Mace is flirty and seems to enjoy the drugs and sexual attention from older men. The night that he visits is when things get truly over-the-top goofy. Jonah is drugged and led to the aforementioned garden shed, where Richard and his friends reveal a trap door in the floor. Below is a sex dungeon. They usher Jonah, Mace, and the entire waitstaff inside and what follows is a deliriously goofy BDSM/torture/gang rape scene where every old man apparently has the stamina to fuck every single young man multiple times.
The next day Richard plies Jonah with career opportunities and more extravagant gifts to stop him from leaving. He buys Jonah $3000+ in designer clothes and promises to pay Jonah's rent if he quits his job. Jonah is grateful. He likes the idea of being Richard's kept boy as he works on his new play ("Notes on Future Conversations" -- he's turned his stalker notes into a play by writing down the real interactions between himself and Richard). But the new play rings inauthentic and frustrates Jonah, and one night he deletes it all and instead writes an embarrassing dialogue between his character and Richard's, where Jonah scolds Richard for abusing him and ends his diatribe with "die die die die die DIE DIE DIE DIE."
Then, because apparently he was drunk while doing this, Jonah passes out. He wakes up to find Richard reading the play. Richard cheerfully closes the laptop and reminds Jonah that they reservations at a fancy restaurant. On the ride there, he remains upbeat and sweet. But at the restaurant, he tells Jonah they need to break up. It's not about the play -- he understands that the play is fictional. It's just that he and Jonah are in totally different life paths right now and their relationship can't last. Of course, Jonah is free to stay at the compound, he doesn't have to leave. In fact, Jonah's not allowed to leave. Because Jonah owes Richard $2000 for the rent Richard paid, and $3000 for the designer clothes.
Jonah's flabbergasted and indignant but ... he doesn't really put up a fight. Richard proposes that Jonah join the waitstaff. They sleep in the garden shed (free room and board!) and are paid $200 per week, which will of course be confiscated by Richard until Jonah's debt is paid. After he makes $5000, he can even stay on at the compound and keep working until he's saved enough money to leave! How great!
Jonah just...agrees. He has $50 in his pocket, which in 2008, when the book takes place, was DEFINITELY enough money for a train ticket outta there. But then what would he do? he asks himself. Go back to New York and just be homeless? No way. Indentured servitude is obviously the way to go. Oh, have I mentioned that at this point RICHARD HAS MURDERED EVAN??? AND JONAH HEARD IT HAPPENING?? AND HE STILL AGREES TO STAY?
It's not even that he THINKS of Evan's weird off-screen bizarrely-unaffecting murder and goes, "God, Rich will kill me if I try to leave. I have no choice." He doesn't think of the murder he overheard at all, he's just like, "Geez it would suck to go back home with no cash." So Jonah meekly returns to the compound and joins the waitstaff. Up until this point, he and Mace Miller had been friends -- the two upcoming protegees with rich, abusive boyfriends. They had solidarity. But now Jonah is the servant and Mace is still the beloved child star. He immediately grows to resent Mace, uh, seemingly with no awareness of the fact that Mace is a child who has known and worked with his "boyfriend" since he was eight...
Richard's mom comes over for a birthday celebration. She's especially critical, and she leaves when Richard's incest play is brought up. She sort-of kind-of confirms that she did molest Richard before she goes, and afterward, Richard begs Mace to wear a blonde bob wig, his mother's hairstyle, and do an impersonation. Mace won't do it, so Jonah does, and uses the opportunity to mock Richard. When Richard begs to hear "I love you," from his mom, Jonah-as-Mommy spits, "I don't love you, I just fucked you," and a furious Richard knocks him unconscious. Jonah wakes groggily to see Mace, in the wig, getting fucked by Richard on the floor.
This is unironically the best scene in the novel. Maybe the ONLY good scene. I was actually interested in ALL of this. But it's worth noting that at this point Jonah has decided that his only way out is to kill Richard in self-defense. He's been trying to provoke Richard all night and now he has his chance. He can say he was defending a child, I guess (Jonah himself does NOT THINK THIS and it's not clear why he sees THIS moment as a good opportunity to claim self-defense, since he's not being hurt). (Also, yes, Jonah did consider escape and even found a great escape route, but when the other waiters refused to come with him, he decided to do murder instead).
Spoiler alert: Jonah doesn't kill Richard. He fucks up his attack. The resulting fight ends up with a waiter badly injured, maybe even dying, and a panicked Richard shoves the corpse into a car and orders Mace and Jonah to take him elsewhere. "He can't die here!"
Mace and Jonah take the waiter to the hospital. They evade questions and lie about what happened, and where, and apparently they don't ring any alarm bells by doing so -- the police never get involved or anything. But in the hospital lobby, Mace takes a few $20s from his pocket and gives them to Jonah, urging him to run.
This time Jonah does. Why is it different this time, to leave with a scarce amount of cash?? I don't know!! He was already getting gang raped and tortured the LAST time he refused to leave with just a pocketful of cash! When he developed his escape plan and then decided against it, it was because the other waiters were like, "Dude, you'll just be homeless when you get to NYC." What makes him change his mind? He seems emotionally unaffected by Mace's rape and Chase the waiter's near-death. Those are things that Just Happened in Jonah's vicinity, not thing that affected him. So...???
He takes the cash, he gets a train, he goes back to his mom's house, he mooches off her for a while and then steals $400 from her and goes...back...to NYC.... ??? After a week in a hostel, he returns to his waiter job and begs for it back. As this section of the novel wraps up, we learn that the character from the prologue, the one who sued Richard for rape/abuse, was in fact Mace Miller -- that Mace gathered the courage to tell the world what happened to him in 2011, that Jonah promised to help him bring Richard down but then chickened out for reasons unknown.
OK. Part 2. Flash forward to 2018, the #MeToo era. Jonah is a staff writer for some gossip rag, and former child star Mace Miller has just had a meth-fueled breakdown where he dressed in drag (including the blonde bob wig) and punched a Denny's cashier for not giving him 100 packs of honey. (This sequence, like the Mommy sequence, also interested me, but wasn't used to its full potential). Jonah's boss asks him to write about the breakdown, but Jonah refuses. Soon after, #MeToo really picks up steam and Jonah gets the scoop on a famous Hollywood producer who molested a series of male child stars. He establishes a rapport with one of the victims and convinces the boy to come forward publicly and act as a spokesperson for the movement.
Incidentally, this means that Jonah is manipulating a young rape victim SOLELY AND EXPLICITLY to propel his own career forward and make a profit off the kid's abuse. That's FASCINATING. But it is never addressed or explored, and again, it seems to be an event that Just Happens, not an event that says anything about Jonah as a character or deserves examination.
As Jonah makes $$$ from other people's abuse, he worries that someone will dig up his own #MeToo moment. Especially since Mace Miller is in the news all the time for his breakdown. Mace was dismissed as a liar at the time, but that was years ago; it's only a matter of time before someone remembers and reexamines Mace in the light of #MeToo. After telling us what's inevitable, the author then writes the inevitable. Jonah is exposed by a TikTok-type celebrity who unearths his old testimony in support of Richard and speculates that Jonah was Richard's accomplice, procuring young boys for the pedophile parties.
As Jonah's career crumbles, he ... falls in... with a cult. Uh. Like he's miserable, suicidal. He falls down drunk in the street and a beautiful teenage girl picks him up and guides him to this "church," where he's enraptured by the hot, obviously-gay preacher. Jonah is vulnerable and feels an intense spiritual awakening and ends up on yet another compound, this time with a bunch of damaged, desperate minorities who have been sucked in by this church. He testifies about his abuse at Richard's hands onstage and is assured that if he just stays celibate, God will forgive him for being gay. Jonah, a BIBLE BELT GAY WHO WENT TO CONVERSION THERAPY, has apparently never heard this before, and is amazed! He agrees to be celibate, only to be raped by the hot gay preacher who told him to stay celibate in the first place.
Sigh. Jonah leaves the cult. He emails Mace (how does he have Mace's email??) an apology, and posts a public article about why he testified for Richard, where he comes clean about the abuse and rape. Mace forgives him and urges Jonah to get therapy, and I'll be honest, Mace's return email was the ONLY part of the book where dialogue struck me as natural and authentic. But the very same night, Mace gets methed up again and kills himself in his mom's bathtub.
(...This was not handled well by the author. I mean, Mace's letter to Jonah shows us a mature, settled young man who has gotten away from Hollywood, healed his relationship with his mom, and kicked his addictions. He's down-to-earth, compassionate, and extremely wise. But mere hours after sending Jonah that email, he relapses and kills himself. Again, this is an idea that COULD work EXTREMELY well, but the writer just wasn't talented enough to pull it off. He contrasts the most genuine moment of the book with an immediate, inauthentic-feeling reversal).
Sigh sigh sigh. Okay. So Jonah is wrecked by this and uh, somehow ends up reconnecting with his dad. The thing about Jonah's dad is, as we learn very early on in the book, he's a Bible Belt megachurch preacher. He's rabidly homophobic. When he finds out Jonah (age 21) is chatting with men online, he sends Jonah to conversion therapy for a whole year. Jonah's therapist tries desperately to find the root of Jonah's homosexuality and eventually convinces Jonah that he must have been molested by a man. Jonah and his therapist work to "uncover repressed memories," and Jonah accuses his father (falsely) of molesting him. Dad is abandoned by the church (UNREALISTIC), and the very same night that he's accused, he empties his bank accounts and disappears.
This is in part why Jonah's treatment of his mother rankles readers so badly. Jonah's mom stays. She works two jobs to make ends meet, while Jonah himself refuses to get a job, believing that if he becomes employed, he'll be tied to the Bible Belt forever. His mom puts him through grad school and sends him money in NYC, she accepts him back with open arms when he's traumatized, and this asshole steals from her! But I digress. Late in the book, Jonah's dad wants to meet up. It turns out that when Daddy left, he went back to his own father's Depression-era strawberry farm and became a field worker. Daddy and Granddaddy had a tense relationship that got worse when Granddaddy got Alzheimer's (and eventually died). But the harshness of that relationship made Daddy realize what a dick he'd been to Jonah. He reformed himself and started attending ex-evangelical support groups in Chicago. (He explicitly says the ex-vangelicals were mostly gay people who had been oppressed by the church -- they didn't feel uncomfortable with a straight ex-preacher who sent his son to conversion therapy in their group? Was that really the healthiest way to heal for them all? I don't know...)
The support group eventually became a pro-gay church, and now the dad preaches there. Jonah goes to live with his dad, joins the church, and finds peace and God again. His mother emails them to say she's now a rabid homophobe herself and wants nothing to do with them. The End.
(deep breath)
This book was like, 200 pages long, guys. It was NOT long enough to show a happy relationship delve into an abusive one while ALSO tackling Richard's incest trauma, Jonah's kinship with Mace Miller, Jonah's fucked-up relationships with his mom and dad. It DEFINITELY wasn't long enough to tackle all of the above while also introducing a nefarious ring of gay rapists with a secret torture dungeon in the Hamptons, and also a rapey Christian cult, and also a healing strawberry farm and pro-gay church. Even a skilled writer would struggle to juggle those elements and do them all justice (if you accept the premise that these are good ideas and SHOULD be juggled at all).
Parks-Ramage, as a writer... he's not bad. Honestly. He's competent. He's had a lot of writing gigs in his life and it shows. He knows how to string a sentence together. But he's by no means an interesting writer. This plot is stuffed full of potentially interesting ideas, and Parks-Ramage isn't equipped to handle them. Each new element is delivered in the form of flat exposition. Dialogue is bland, immemorable, with zero surprises. No character ever surprises me, actually; nor do I ever get that pleasantly-surprised "wow!" moment while reading a particularly beautiful sentence or impactful snippet of dialogue. Also, I can't help but pick this bone: why do we need to constantly devote entire pages to the most dull subjects in this book?? Paragraph after paragraph describes Jonah's budget during his escape from the Hamptons. "I had $200 from Mace and I spent $100 on a train ticket to NYC and then the hostel was $40 a night and I spent $10 on food each day at the bodega--" LOOK, I JUST SUMMED IT UP INTO ONE SENTENCE, and even THAT sentence is so long and boring that it ought to be cut!
The characters really seem like cardboard cut-outs -- broad strokes of common stereotypes. Richard's most interesting trait is that he was apparently molested by his mom, but outside of the Mace rape scene, it's never explored. And that one scene is not enough to justify including incest as a plot point, imo. Not saying that you have to justify incest specifically, but that you have to justify EVERY plot point -- you have to treat your plot points with respect, think about them seriously, explore them to the full extent. If you fail to do that with ANY plot point then your book immediately becomes shakier.
Jonah, unlike Richard, is stuffed with potentially interesting traits. He falsely accused his dad of molestation. He only just recently went to conversion therapy. He's manipulative, selfish, vain, a little cutthroat. But all these things are written, somehow, so blandly, that Jonah is immensely boring to read. In the back of the book, Parks-Ramage talks about Jonah. He admits that many early readers considered Jonah to be too unsympathetic. Parks-Ramage contends that Jonah is MEANT to be unsympathetic. He wanted to explore unsympathetic, imperfect victims.
Reading this made it all click for me about why Jonah doesn't work. Parks-Ramage really didn't set out to write a person; he set out to write an unsympathetic victim specifically so he could make an Important Point. This is why it seems like all of Jonah's actions Just Happen, coincidentally, without any impact on him -- because Parks-Ramage isn't interested in the bare-minimum work of exploring Jonah's personality. Those things are PURELY there to establish that not all victims are angels, And They Deserve Justice Anyway.
Me, to a friend: "[explains the plot]"
My friend: "Why can't people just write good books"
My friend: "pro gay churches are such copouts. I think i could write a book better than this."
My friend: "Me too movement was a cancer on literature"
no subject
Date: 2024-01-04 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 01:34 pm (UTC)It's the same with bad movies. I used to drive my ex-wife crazy hunting down awful 80s horror movies to watch before work.
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Date: 2024-01-08 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 01:30 pm (UTC)