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2.0 out of 5 stars
Too Much Too Late!, May 2 2002
There was a time when I enjoyed Picano's novels. I remember liking THE LURE a great deal and recommending it to all my friends. I certainly thought LIKE PEOPLE IN HISTORY was well worth the read. I do not know what went wrong with ONYX. I read that Mr. Picano lost a lover to AIDS. Any gay male in any major city in the United States in the last 20 years and is fortunate enough to be alive certainly understands the writer's loss. That, however, is no excuse for this book. Mr. Picano should have written another AIDS memoir or worked harder on this novel. The characters are basically black and white. I had difficulty believing they were real. Ray, an Adonis, in the most graphic of scenes, has sex with the "straight" blue-collar worker Mike, who is also an Adonis, over and over, then rushes to give a blow by blow description of his adventures to his dying lover Jesse, who can't wait to hear such stories and encourages Ray. Mike and Ray do not practice "safer" sex either. Certainly we have all known too many parents of AIDS patients who are awful people; but Adele Vaughan Moody, nee Carstairs-- do you belive that name--is a total caricature. The basest characters have some glimmer of
goodness if they are to be believed at all. Finally the awful hospital scenes were so graphic as to be unreadable. I think Mr. Picano achieved a first in his minute description of how a body is burned in a crematory. Surely the Greeks who were right about so many things were absolutely on target when they had some things happen off stage.Many fine AIDS books, both memoirs and novels, have been written in the past two decades...Sadly this one does not fall in that category. It's far too much, far too late.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Too Much Too Late!, May 2 2002
There was a time when I enjoyed Picano's novels. I remember liking THE LURE a great deal and recommending it to all my friends. I certainly thought LIKE PEOPLE IN HISTORY was well worth the read. I do not know what went wrong with ONYX. I read that Mr. Picano lost a lover to AIDS. Any gay male in any major city in the United States in the last 20 years who is fortunate enough to be alive certainly understands the writer's loss. That, however, is no excuse for this book. Mr. Picano should have written another AIDS memoir or worked harder on this novel. The characters are basically black and white. I had difficulty believing they were real. For example, Ray, an Adonis, in the most graphic of scenes, has sex with the "straight" blue-collar worker Mike, who is also an Adonis, over and over, then rushes to give a blow by blow description of his adventures to his dying lover Jesse, who is without jealousy, can't wait to hear such stories and encourages Ray, who feels no guilt. Mike and Ray do not practice "safer" sex either. Certainly we have all known too many parents of AIDS patients who are awful people; but Jesse's mother, Adele Vaughan Moody, nee Carstairs-- if one can belive that name--is totally bad, a complete caricature. The basest characters must have some glimmer of goodness if they are to be believed at all. Finally the awful hospital scenes were so graphic as to be unreadable. I think Mr. Picano achieved a first in his minute description of how a body is burned in a crematory. Surely the Greeks, who were right about so many things, were absolutely correct when they had some things happen off stage. Many fine books about AIDS, both memoirs and novels, have been written in the past two decades. Monette's BORROWED TIME: AN AIDS MEMOIR, Mark Doty's HEAVEN'S COAST, the wonderful HOLDING THE MAN by the Australian writer Timothy Conigrave, Allen Gurganus' PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS, Edumnd White's THE MARRIED MAN, come to mind. Sadly this novel does not make the list. Reading this novel was not a total waste, however. I think I'll rent some of the Astaire/Rogers movies one of Picano's characters keeps watching to entertain himself. I kept wishing I were watching the graceful Astaire and Rogers instead of plowing through this novel.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
His Own Most Personal Tragedy, Mar 15 2002
"Will gay writers continue writing about AIDS," someone asked Felice Picano after his brilliant "Excavating the Self in Your Writing" lecture at the Lambda Writers Festival last October. He had just spoken on memoir writing, and the core reference was his own latest novel, Onyx, about the horrors of his lover's last months of suffering and unspeakable hospital ordeal. With this novel Picano adds his voice to other memoirs of the plague-a canon including Edmund White's The Married Man, Paul Monette's Borrowed Time, Fenton Johnson's The Geography of the Heart, and my personal favorite, Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest. Onyx may be admired from many perspectives. Few writers can approach Picano's craft. He can make a line sing. He can tug at the heart, the head, or the haunches with lyricism, humor, and lusty eroticism. His writing is deeply human, the conflicts are complex, and his stories move along and are emotionally moving. Yet I finished Onyx less disturbed, less shaken than I was prepared to be. How is it that the author of exhilarating classics like The Lure and Like People in History could write his own most personal tragedy, the loss of his life partner and soul mate, and I not be moved to tears? The story opens with morning light through vertical blinds and ends with evening light through an airplane's window as Ray flies to the West Coast to start over after the deaths of his lover in a New York hospital and his teenage nephew, struck by a car as he runs to find his uncle. In between, Ray cares for Jesse through every crisis, and Jesse magnanimously encourages Ray to find a sexual partner since Jesse's failing health has cost them that intimacy. Ray meets a hunky, straight, blue-collar, married guy and easily seduces him-a variation on the Cowboy and the Dandy, the naive but more-than-willing-to-learn, curious-if-not-questioning innocent and the worldly sophisticate. Ray teaches Mike things he did not know, and Mike keeps coming back for more instruction. The relationship never goes beyond sex for either man. Ray even tells Jesse what's going on, proof that mere sex cannot sully their perfect marriage. There's also a handsome plumber and a French film producer Ray attracts with innuendo and his big libido. Domestic duties, sex, career moves, and the high drama of Jesse's dying make the story lines. Nowhere has the horror of AIDS been more graphically described. Even the elaborate description of Jesse's cremation is anticlimactic to the suffering Ray saw Jesse endure. To avoid unmitigated gloom and doom, Picano mates Ray and Mike in frequent sex scenes-like comic relief in heavy drama. The scenes sizzle, but they ill-serve, I think, the undying love the novel is about. And other problems undermine Onyx. Adele, Jesse's southern mom, is so malevolent that she's a stick-figure harridan, the stereotypical mother-in-law from Hell; a caricature without a single redeeming trait. Sometimes, too, the writing takes over the story, as in displays of musicological esoterica, and becomes its own end. The original hardback edition also contains an excessive number of textual errors, including words out of order, phrases repeated, and careless typos. In his October lecture, Picano said that enough time must pass between events and writers' memories of them in order to make the creative transformation into fiction-time to move from uncontrolled feelings to controlled objectivity. Onyx needed a longer gestation than its ten years. I wanted to love this book. Instead, I liked it. What might have been a five-star novel by an all-star writer is only a very good three-star one.
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