In One Person by John Irving; Simon and Schuster, $28 hardback
King of Angels by Perry Brass; Belhue Press, $18 paperback
The recent rash of questionable memoirs that included a bit too much fiction reduces the idea of a "true" account to the debatable. Leave it to two rich memoir-esque novels to further the cause of inner truth and a search for identity by combining realistic stories with religious allegory and a Bardian repertory.
Both prolific Perry Brass, a pinnacle of independent publishing, and John Irving, a major bestseller, have set their new novels in towns not unlike those of their own upbringing. Brass, from Savannah, Georgia, writes of 12-year-old Benjamin Rothberg, who's moved to Savannah with his tender yet troubled mother and absent father at the moment of his awareness of being attracted to boys his age. Irving's New England private school upbringing, like that of the fictional Garp and his nurse mother, returns us to a similar small school, where a young teenage Billy Abbott, like Benjamin, guards a precocious sexual curiosity.
While Brass' rich descriptions verge on poetic, they remain specific to emotions and action. With Irving's narrator, a 70-year-old Abbott, we're more removed from the situation. But details are rich.
Brass describes each sexual encounter as a journey between Benjamin and a series of flirtatious and duplicitous Catholic boys at the school, where, being Jewish, he's more than differently treated. He's bullied by a trio of boys until he fights back. That only sharpens his foes' determination. The school life, a calamitous bar mitzvah, and a nearly gothic summer camp section, each build with a humid tension.
Irving's tale retains a comparative lack of melodrama as Abbott tumbles between fetishizing his friend Elaine's training bra, to the two of them conspiring to figure out the desires of Jacques Kittredge, the ominously clever and gorgeous wrestler. Through Billy's youth, community theatre draws his family, including grizzled lumber workers who don petticoats for Shakespeare and other classics. Wrestling and transgendered mentor/lovers, prominent in The World According to Garp, return to Irving's ensemble, yet from a different perspective. Compulsive water-spitting lightweights, and even the handsome Jacques, cross paths with Billy and his family in the play productions.
But while a story of sexual exploration, there's something a bit passionless to In One Person. Gender and masculine roles, both amorous, curious, and passionate, shift through Billy's life, from his attraction to a stern yet buxom librarian (who has the worst-kept gender secret in town) to the eventual fate of his friends and lovers. There are parts that seem simply realistic, not over- or under-played, which is what makes the story so engaging. But in-between his many affairs, the span of his one gay male relationship, with schoolmate Arthur, is marred by its brevity. Compared to Billy and Elaine's years-long obsession with Jacques Kittredge, it at first seems like an afterthought.
The passage of time through Vietnam and the onslaught of the AIDS crisis are handled in successive waves through Abbott's life story. Arthur's tragedy, foretold several times in the book, is preceded by their trip to Paris, where Arthur's revulsion for Madame Bovary, which Arthur nevertheless demands Billy read to him, turns their garret-dreary summer from a honeymoon into a divorce.
While not a family saga, Brass' story builds to one moment of Benjamin's youth. Brass' florid allegory, albeit written in an almost flat syntax, deftly portrays the voice of an awkward teenage narrator. A pivotal tragedy in King of Angels serves as both symbolic, surprising and inevitable. With his singular experience as "the other," Benjamin finds his own identity, and defies the steeping hypocrisy of his Catholic instructors. The additional family drama plays out to add to Benjamin's stress, leading to an epiphany moment, conveniently during a school Nativity pageant.
In Irving's book, theatrical spectacle also weaves through the engagingly written family and theatre scenes. All seems well. But in later productions, when aging crossdressing grandparents become passe and affairs become known, the play of the season reflects metaphorically on the family's, and Billy's story. We know this because the narrator explains it to us, cleverly.
That's the difference. Brass crystallizes small moments to stir passion. While Irving straddles a century of queer-dabbling well beyond a Kinsey scale, he tells of it in a remote tone, a level of presentation beyond the theatricals. He plays many people, none contented. The abrupt last chapter, an esprit d'escalier literally set on the steps of a theatre, finds the elder Abbott still pronouncing his uncategorizable nature to an ironically met teenager, angry, resolute, and finally passionate.