A witty look at gay life over the last fifty years focuses on Reeve, a hospitalized sixty-two-year-old gay man, who thinks back to his college years and his troubled relationship with famed literary scholar Tom Slater. A first novel. Tour.
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From Publishers Weekly
Handsome prose and the erotic undercurrent of pre-Stonewall gay life strengthen this intriguing first novel. While recuperating from a hustler's brutal beating, Reeve, a 62-year-old gay man, finds his attention split between lustful thoughts for his young, straight hospital roommate and memories of his college professor and mentor, Tom Slater (a character based on critic, author and Harvard professor F. O. Matthiessen, 1902-1950). Slater, known both for his seminar on American studies and (among the cognoscenti) for his closeted lifestyle, was both a homosexual and a member of the Communist Party. Several scenes reoccur throughout this novel--particularly those of Reeve's beating and a university president's destruction of Slater's career during the McCarthy era--though neither plot nor character is further illuminated after the initial revelations. In fact, the work relies heavily on supposition: Slater's life and downfall is reconstructed as Reeve imagines it to have happened. Though this method reveals Merlis's considerable talent, it fails to raise his main characters, both passive victims, to the historical status they are due. "He was so much a ghost that I couldn't touch him," Reeve says of Slater, who ultimately remains as much of an enigma as Matthiessen himself.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Reeve is lain up in the hospital after being beaten up by a man he picked up in a bar. As he recuperates, he considers his life to date, thus revealing to us the significant details. Reeve contemplates meticulously and mournfully on four levels: his flirtation with the handsome young straight in the next bed; the degradation and eventual suicide of his friend Tom Slater, a martyr to McCarthyism; his own beating by the hustler; and the outline of his life. Reeve is an uncommonly thoughtful and perceptive man; there is a wealth of feeling and literary knowledge in this work, surely one of the finest first novels to appear in many a moon. Its simple, noble, graceful prose refreshes the very language, and its unsquinting portrayal of gay men is searing and authentic. Merlis's novel belongs to the best of contemporary literature, gay or other. Recommended for most collections.
Brian Geary, West Seneca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Brian Geary, West Seneca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
Format:Paperback
There seldom comes into my reading life a book as fine as this one. I read a lot of books, and frequently try new authors being published for the first time. This book completely blew me away. The author has such a wonderful command of our language - using phrases and words to their best advantage. He exhibits such an intense ability to get inside his characters - to be able to give them feelings that are so easily conveyed to his reader. I laughed at times, I cried at times. This is one of those fine examples of books that you don't want to finish - you simply sigh at the end and wish for more.
Format:Paperback
Merlis' story is so beautifully crafted, that it can be read just for the appreciation of the language alone. The literary device he uses takes him from the present, where he is recovering from a vicious attack from someone he brought into his home, to the past, where he ruminates on his first romantic involvement with an erudite, but inhibited professor, battling the McCarthyism of the Fifties. At the center of the dilemma is having to live in a world that has no tolerance, let alone respect, for age, individualism or political integrity. This is a rare treat. Compelling story, mesmerizing language. You'll laugh out loud at times and at times you'll have tears in your eyes. Watch this writer.
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Merlis brilliantly composes American Studies, but unfortunately, his character development comes to a screeching halt somewhere in the middle of the novel. Merlis goes from a fine story to some sort of a soap opera-esqe ending that leaves this reader cold.
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