amado1

I 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.

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(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"

Oh my god, I read "Flowers of Buffoonery" and I'm back in my Osamu Dazai era...

Like, look, I didn't even know what "Flowers of Buffoonery" was ABOUT, I just knew that I loved "No Longer Human" (it's one of my Top 5 favorite novels) so I just grabbed it without reading the back T__T Holy shit, it was good. It's a prequel to "No Longer Human," featuring the same suicidal protagonist as a young man.

This novel takes place over a period of four days, following Yozo immediately after his failed double-suicide (where an unnamed woman died, but Yozo was rescued from the sea by fishermen) up to the day of his release from the sanatorium by the sea, where he'll presumably be taken into police custody for aiding a suicide. There aren't a ton of named characters. We meet Yozo's best friends, a fellow art student named Hida and his younger cousin Kosuge, and his nurse Mano, who has a scar over her eye and was bullied as a child, called "Firefly".

Kosuge and Hida are deathly afraid of addressing how serious this is. They can't stand to sit down and discuss Yozo's mental health, and neither can he -- so for the four days they're in the hospital together, they have a riot instead. Telling funny stories and exaggerating their laughter, playing pranks on the nurses, flirting self-deprecatingly with the tubercular girls in the sanatorium. Occasionally, Yozo (a talented painter) will try to sketch the sea where he almost drowned, but then he crumples the paper up and criticizes his own work.

The forced light-heartedness really underscores the sporadic moments where all the masking stops and we remember that Yozo is here because he tried to kill himself -- and because a girl we know nothing about did succeed, and nobody will talk about her. These are quiet moments, usually between Yozo and Mano, at night, when the boys are gone -- once, between Yozo and Hida on the beach, when a pair of tubercular patients almost flirted with the boys, and then shyly turned away.

Tension is peppered throughout the narrative by serious adults -- Yozo's brother, the sanatorium director, the detectives -- who intrude on Yozo's hospital room to severely remind him (and the reader) that we don't know what happened before Page 1. Who was this girl? Did you know she had a husband? They found her body, you know. Did she really want to jump? Maybe she did, but we're not so convinced you wanted to die with her... Yozo's older brother works furiously to prevent charges from being brought while Yozo retreats into himself and plays cards with his friends; the director loans Yozo his own son's kimono when Yozo's clothes are destroyed by the waves, but also, almost bashfully, tells Yozo that he hopes the kid has learned his lesson.

At the end, you can sense Yozo's careful, fragile mask starting to crack. His friends fall out of the narrative. It's just him and Mano, Mano reaching out to him, seeking emotional connection, and Yozo almost panicking when she does. The day of Yozo's release, he and Mano take a wintry hike across the cliffs in the hopes of seeing Mount Fuji. But when they reach the clifftop, the sky is too foggy, and there's nothing to be seen -- just a 300-foot drop at Yozo's feet.

The end!

Throughout the short novel, at the end of almost every chapter, we have notes from the writer -- an anxious, self-critical mess who laments comically that his novel is never going to be the masterpiece he hopes it will. The characters won't work with him; his technique is too sloppy and transparent. Apparently this is something Dazai lifted from Gide, but I think it works phenomenally well for this particular story -- the so-called "flowers of buffoonery" are, as Dazai describes, the delicate, fragile acts of clowning that the boys get up to, to protect each other from thoughts of Yozo's near-suicide. Periodically, throughout the novel, those flowers collapse and die. If you know anything about Dazai, then you know this story is lifted directly from his own life, when he ran away with a bar-maid as a young man and tried to commit double-suicide together -- she drowned; he was rescued; his older brother saved him from prosecution.

The comical, self-deprecating notes at the end of each chapter distract us from this, but it's a fragile framework, and toward the end of the book it collapses entirely and disappears, leaving us with the stark autobiographical nature of the story and the uneasy knowledge -- as Yozo edges toward the cliff -- that Dazai did end up dying in another double-suicide later in life, also by drowning.

OK!

Earlier this year, I read David Gerrold's "The Case of the Green Carnation," where Holmes and Watson delicately attempt to help poor Oscar Wilde out. I gave the book a high-star review, 4 or 5, and thought at the time that I honestly couldn't expect better. But Mary Pagones blew old Dave out of the water.

"A Study in Scarlet Marquis" is rigorously researched, packed with witty whipcrack dialogue, and is laced with a tragic tenderness all throughout -- Oscar Wilde's suicidal decision to go to trial is treated with heartbreaking sympathy; Holmes' and Watson's relationship with Francis Douglas makes me ACHE; and ofc the barely-spoken love between Holmes and Watson is the whole book's underlying emotional thread. Besides that, the prose is totally electric and all the descriptions just pop off the page.

About Oscar Wilde: I've always been fond of him. The first time I read him was when I found a Dover Thrift Edition of Dorian Gray in this Christian bookshop as a kid -- instantly it became my favorite book. I didn't even understand half of what was going on in the narrative but I adored it. Since reading "De Profundis," I've become a bit sensitive to portrayals of Wilde as a ridiculous, pretentious fop -- there's an element of this at play in David Gerrold's work. Holmes and Watson are the steady, respectable, totally discreet homosexuals; Wilde is the faintly disgusting poseur who comes across as reckless, whiny.

But that's not the case with Mary Pagones. Oscar Wilde is portrayed sensitively, affectionately -- aging, and terrifying aware of his age, his impending ugliness, his blackened teeth; hitched to a beautiful, coarse creature who can't hope to match him intellectually and treats him with profound cruelty and hints of true-to-life abuse. His devotion to Alfred seems self-aware, resigned, and suicidal. Watson and Holmes watch him go down with a sympathy and sadness -- and deep affection -- that infects the reader. And although Watson and Holmes are much better at disguising their homosexuality, the author makes it clear that they're no better than Oscar for that, and their efforts and fears do nothing to really protect them in the end.

OK, that's my general review XD Now here's a general overview of the plot:

It started with Watson and Holmes on vacation in the English countryside, where they hear of a deadly accident at a nearby hunting party. They arrive to examine the body, a young man (and real-life historical figure) named Francis Douglas, who has clearly committed suicide. Francis' companions refuse to believe it and Watson and Holmes agree that it would be unkind to force them to admit it. They allow the coroner to mark Francis' death down as an accident.

During this scene, it becomes clear that Watson and Holmes have met Francis before and are deeply saddened by his death.

In the next chapter, the narrative jumps back a few years, to the first time Holmes and Watson met Francis -- then a nervous wreck with his nails bitten brutally short. Francis is working as a personal secretary to Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery and future Prime Minister. At first Holmes and Watson think Francis must be here because of Rosebery, but no -- it's about Francis' beautiful younger brother, Lord Alfred Douglas. Alfred, nicknamed Bosie, is dating Oscar Wilde, and has recently gotten "poor Oscar" into some trouble.

Basically, when Oscar wrote a lavishly affectionate letter to Bosie, Bosie slipped the letter into his coat pocket. Later that same night, Bosie hired a young male prostitute (there are rumors he never actually slept with Wilde, considering him too old and fat), and lent the boy his coat. The boy found the incriminating letter in the pocket, stole it, and is now using it to blackmail Wilde for the outrageous sum of 60 pounds, which is far outside Wilde's budget -- despite his posturing as an extravagant gentleman, he's viciously broke, and spends all his money appeasing Bosie's aristocratic tastes.

Francis is worried out of his mind. His father, the Marquess of Queensbury, is totally insane and abusive to both boys -- even Francis, his favorite. If this evidence gets out that Bosie and Oscar are really in a relationship, the Marquess might do something drastic. Holmes and Watson agree to visit Wilde, where Holmes gently suggests that Wilde just publish the letter himself and call it a prose sonnet.

The problem seems solved, but Bosie continues to be reckless, and the Marquess' feverish desire to ruin his own sons only grows. Soon it spreads to Francis as well -- because Rosebery has a habit of picking up handsome young male secretaries and then firing them when they get married. Francis admits to Holmes that he and Rosebery are indeed together, and he doesn't know what to do. It's an impossible situation. His father is determined to prove Rosebery is sodomizing his son -- and that Wilde is sodomizing the other. The Marquess doesn't care that in doing so, he'll ruin the reputation of both Douglas boys. In fact, that might be exactly what the Marquess wants; he seems to deliberately sabotage both sons no matter what steps they take in life. He punishes Alfred for being idle the same way he punishes Francis for taking a job.

While Holmes and Watson try to save Wilde from one Douglas boy and the other Douglas boy from himself, they also quietly deal with their own problems -- cruel bickering where a moody Holmes insults Watson's writing, hitting on a sore spot; Holmes' addiction to cocaine; Mycroft's increasingly frequent visits and his warnings that they need to live separately, try to be less conspicuous, and even the ramifications of Watson's stories and their various fabrications. Most notably, in this story, Watson made up the Reichenbach Falls; yes, Holmes really did leave him there, and no, Holmes didn't tell him why, but there was no Professor Moriarty, no dramatic fall to the death. Holmes simply left. Officially, in Watson's stories, Holmes is still dead, and they're living off royalties from Holmes' research papers and paltry detective fees. But everyone in London knows Holmes is alive because they can see him and Watson walking down the street daily, arm in arm. The question is, when will Holmes let Watson resurrect him? And the tension lies in Watson's writing, Holmes' discomfort with how they're portrayed, both of their unease with the lies about Watson's marriage and their relationship.

There's an excellent scene about midway through the book where Watson visits a doctor. At first we think he's going there to get his leg checked up; ever since Chapter 1, the author's been mentioning Watson's war wound and its stiffness, deliberately setting us up for this moment imo. But Watson is really there to talk about Holmes. He discusses Holmes' mood swings -- dark depressive phases that last for days, where he can get really cruel; wild upswings where he doesn't sleep for an entire week. Work helps keep him steady; cocaine makes the mood swings worse.

For a little while, Watson and the doctor politely discuss how cocaine negatively impacts someone like Holmes, and then the doctor takes a hard swerve: his prescription is for Holmes and Watson to leave England entirely. Go to France, where the social climate is kinder. Live openly and happily. Watson's cheeks burn but he goes numb and quietly says that they can't do that; Holmes loves London more than he loves any man.

Ouch!!

Eventually, the narrative takes us back to Francis' suicide, which hurts DEEPLY now, because we've seen how he met Holmes and Watson, watched their friendship develop, grew to genuinely like this kid -- a closeted gay kid, the responsible older son, doomed to constantly cover for and protect his flamboyantly open younger brother. When Francis is rejected by Rosebery and forced to marry a woman, he kills himself, and that night, we see Holmes and Watson processing the suicide in a lovely, subtle, achingly sad scene in their hotel.

Anyway, here's my highlights -- a mix of shippy Holmes/Watson moments and examples of the snappy dialogue.

*****

( Quotes )

I have many other highlights, but I'll stop there. This is probably the most affecting scene in the novel for me -- this, and the very end, where Holmes and Watson attend the auction of Oscar Wilde's personal possessions. Holmes, a bit of a hoarder himself, is deeply affected by the callous auctioning of Oscar's beloved books (as was I, when I first learned about it). But the only item he himself bids on is Oscar Wilde's writing desk, as a gift to Watson.

The scene above, right after Francis Douglas' death, is another favorite of mine -- the subtlety of Holmes's tears is what makes it for me.

This is a nonfiction book about Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a white lesbian couple who killed themselves and their six adopted children (all Black) by driving their SUV off a cliff in Mendocino County back in 2018.

It's an excellently written book. The author has previous writing credits for covering the foster care system, which is her true focus here: as she notes early in the book, there are plenty of op-eds and podcasts asking us to empathize with Jennifer and Sarah. But there's been zero focus on the kids themselves, their birth families, and how CPS failed them. 

In sum:

( Bio family background )

I'll cover the rest in a bullet-point style to try and keep it brief:
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Well, here's some particularly insightful quotes from the book, some of which are themselves quotes from other books. I'll note that where relevant.

( Quotes )

This is a slim little volume written by Chris Hedges, a war journalist who reported on the Dirty War in Argentina, the Yugoslav Wars, and the Gulf Wars (all prior to publishing this book). It's a great little treatise on the way a state builds up its "national myth" in times of war to whip the people into a fervor -- and an examination of how people really act in wartime, with abundant references to Classical poems and literature.

I don't have my typical Good vs. Bad assessment for this book. The entire text was interesting and well-written; I never felt like the author was wasting my time. His writing style was a little flowery for my tastes, but not offensive, and I quickly got used to it.

So without any frills, here's the quotes I highlighted as I was reading!

 

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The premise: A genderless entity known as A wakes up in a new body every morning. They don't get to choose who. It's always a kid more or less the same age as A, in more or less the same geographical area (which is currently Maryland, and the age is 16). A has been doing this all their life, with no idea why, or who they are, or who their parents are, or what happens if... or how to...

(None of these questions get answered)

( Review )

This was recc'ed to me by a friend who has previously only recc'ed bangers: Octavia E. Butler's Xenogensis trilogy; Carolyn Ives Gilman's Halfway Human; Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow; and now she's recced me The Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I figured I'd pick up "The Mad Scientist's Daughter" next!