RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe portrait we get of Monique’s life is constructed out of vignettes gleaned from scrapbooks and interviews, rendered in the signature collage style that Louis deftly uses to connect his mother’s experience to a broader narrative of working-class struggle ... does have moments of joy, though they are usually routes to the author’s more mournful realizations ... What makes Louis’s writing, here and elsewhere, feel so fresh to these American eyes is its focus on class, a social reality that is often obscured by other identity markers — especially race, gender, and sexuality — that take center stage in our national culture ... by turning repeatedly to the question of class, Louis at once provides refreshing texture to the gay coming-of-age experience while also decentering sexuality as the sole challenge that young Eddy faces ... In Louis’s writing, class is stubborn, an intractable condition that at once puts tremendous pressure on the desire for sociopolitical change and calls into question the very possibility of transformation within the existing liberal regime. It is perhaps because of Louis’s misgivings about the possibility of transformation that he has returned now three times to the scene of his childhood. For his audiences, these tales are highly salable and accrete to their author all kinds of cultural and (one imagines) economic capital. On the strength of this thrice-told story and audiences’ adoration for victim-to-victor narratives, Louis has been able to make a living as a writer whose works have not only sold well, but also have been adapted into plays performed from New York to Berlin. Yet, one gets the clear sense that for Louis, the return to the scene of a troubled childhood is motivated not by opportunism, but by the unresolved nature of his transformation story, a condition that asks big questions for the writer and, he appears to hope, for his reader ... What Louis sketches here in such beautifully direct language is an indictment of the very narratives of transformation that make palatable the (un)changing same of socioeconomic life in contemporary liberal democracies ... If readers hear him, they will hear not only the dramatic story of one French family, but also the larger story of the more urgent changes that are needed so that his tales of transformation are not the unique exception, but rather the experience of so many millions more whose voices have yet to reach our ears.
Garth Greenwell
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe most hotly anticipated queer title of the new decade (though it is only January, dear), Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness offers a familiarly impressive follow-up to his widely acclaimed 2016 debut novel, What Belongs to You ... Greenwell’s movement into short fiction...has provided him the space to write what he wants and, for the most part, to give his readers what they want ... It is hard to think of another contemporary gay writer who so assiduously searches out the (im)possibility of belonging somewhere, of belonging to someone or something, to a couple or community that might heal the deep rifts of loneliness and alienation ... What Greenwell leaves us with is a powerful desire for belonging that is always and everywhere frustrated, the perennial plight of the transnational queer or, a bit larger, a statement about how the realization of our desires to belong to others (and to have others belong to us) must always be deferred, incomplete, impossible. Keeping those wounds open, while gesturing at the possibility of transformation, is one of the signal achievements of Cleanness, and Greenwell’s writing more generally ... With Greenwell, we are lucky to be at the beginning, with the end still many more volumes to come.
Andrea Long Chu
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn effect, everyone who would be pre-programmed to dislike Females will find reasons to do so ... if we sidestep the norms of reception — questions of whether an argument is to accepted or rejected, whether it is good or bad — we are forced to sit, rather uncomfortably, with an ambivalence that beats at the heart of Females’s reading of the interrelation between desire, power, and identity ... Productive as this reading of porn is, Females does some of its most compelling work by way of a rather unexpected close reading of the culture of the manosphere, those parts of the internet where disaffected men (incels and Proud Boys and others) go in search of ways to more authentically inhabit a masculinity no one actually possesses ... While Chu can’t get us out of this trap, and in some ways languishes in this irresolvable what-to-do question in Females, her pointing to it is worthwhile. And so, whether we agree or disagree, Chu gives us much to consider.
André Aciman
PanLos Angeles Review of Books... seems a naked attempt to capitalize on the earlier novel’s runaway success ... The first disappointment in picking up Find Me is that Elio and Oliver’s reunion is relegated to the last 12 pages ... While Sami may have had the most memorable lines from Call Me by Your Name, it seems a stretch that he should be the character whose story anchors the sequel ... we also glimpse the patriarchal energy that settles over Find Me and Call Me by Your Name like a bad smell. In both novels, it is only the male’s desire that matters, only his needs that have weight or substance ... There are strong and impactful reflections on loss, desire, and intimacy, but those themes seem rather diluted and distorted from their earlier pitch ... Every daddy is, in the end, rewarded with a pretty young(er) thing, a sort of literary dose of Viagra for characters elegantly wringing their hands over the loss of youth and vitality ... we watch not so much representations of human beings as representations of representations ... Aciman’s characters read as hollow and shopworn, their idyllic lives vapid, inconsequential, uninteresting. Without anything anchoring them to the ground, neither an impactful realism nor the nuance and complications that make a life interesting to read, the characters in Find Me end up feeling merely lost.
Edmund White
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWhite’s ability to peel away the idealized image exposes the labor involved in maintaining and manufacturing that image. In so doing, he asks serious questions about the kind of life created by and generative of post-Liberation gay identity ... The contemporary gay world is much more expansive than this novel can offer, but it’s still fun to return to the intimate world of Edmund White.
