A year in which the first publication of a big chunk of Walt Whitman prose was eclipsed by new writing, and a new Edmund White novel was an also-ran, became an amazing year for gay fiction. White weighed in with Our Young Man (Bloomsbury USA), a breezy but darkly nostalgic tale that clung to its title like the desperate lovers in the beautiful boy's wake; it went down easily enough. Elsewhere, the earth shook.
The annus mirabilis of 2016 peaked at least four times �" consecutively, with Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Alexander Chee's The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Co.) and Nicole Dennis-Benn's Here Comes the Sun (Liveright) �" novels that pushed the envelope while landing blows to the heart.
The high-wire act was Chee's Queen, a magnificent, ambitious novel that managed to meet its own, dauntingly high aspirations. It's a novel that crossed boundaries and was as much misunderstood as understood when pigeonholed as a historical novel about a 19th-century French opera singer. That was only one "life" of Chee's central character, Liliet Berne, a woman of gritty self-determination who left family disaster on the frozen plain of Minnesota for a wholly unexpected life whose final chapter it would be criminal to give away. This is the kind of "big book" other writers tried for this year (and largely failed), multi-tiered and genre-pushing. Chee, at full, mature mastery, delivered. The sheer achievement would matter less if the book, like its protagonist, had not had as much soul as derring-do.
Haslett's novel, also his second, stuck to more customary fiction territory (family insanity in the American Northeast) and the here-and-now. That said, nothing about it is ordinary, either technically or in the emotional ground it explores. Its most fantastical invention, its central character, Michael �" brilliant not to a fault but to inevitable tragedy �" tosses the reader about with the same centrifugal force as he does his adoring, helpless family. The characters all speak for themselves, in chapters bearing their names, telling the linear story from their own perspectives and in their keenly individual voices. Haslett's transfixing novel speaks all the emotional truth that's bearable, and then some.
Greenwell's short, incisive What Belongs to You so seized the collective imagination of readers worldwide that it overwhelmed the competition. It's given most readers the sense that it was written for them, perhaps exclusively for them. It's a fictional take on the author's own story, teaching English in Bulgaria as an expat, earning citizenship in the land of adult transactions and emotions. I've read it five times and continue to find more in it. Regrettably, in my view, it's been hailed for its putative universality, particularly regarding sexual desire and its consequences, whereas its brilliance is precisely in its meticulous, candid telling of the story of two male individuals �" the unnamed narrator and a hot young Belgian, Mitko, whose major currency in the modern adult world is his smoldering sexuality �" an out-of-the-ordinary collision that proves transformational for both of them.
Its opening, frank account of tea-room hustling and its discontents (only readers actually get off) put the novel on the map, but the first U.S. publication of Neel Mukherjee's 2008 A Life Apart (Norton), also a debut novel, was considerably more detailed in its depiction of gay male cruising. Greenwell's novel is as mandatory reading as any gay novel in our time, but what it shares with Mukherjee's, Chee's and Haslett's, is storytelling at its most empathetic and absorbing.
Of the year's many debut novels, none came so out of the blue (Caribbean blue, specifically) as Nicole Dennis-Benn's hypnotic Here Comes the Sun. It, too, could have contented itself with its unflinching look at the sexploitation of women, lesbians among them if not necessarily in particular, in a Jamaica (her home country) gutted by the forces of tourism. But Dennis-Benn dug deep, telling the wrenching story in luminous prose devoid of self-pity and populated with characters who walked off the page and made you think about them when you were away from the book. It's been snagging prize after richly deserved prize.
Abdellah Taia, the Moroccan novelist who made a splash with his fine first novel Salvation Army, returned with Infidels (Seven Stories Press), a bolder, pithier, nearly poetic look at the infinite complexities of being poor, Muslim and gay in a lot of the wrong places at many of the wrong times. It appeared hard on the heels of Orlando, lending it, too, a patina of topicality or universality, but it tells its mesmerizing story without once resorting to stereotype or cliche.
With Guapa (Other Press), British-based author Saleem Haddad, of Lebanese-Palestinian-Iraqi-German descent, produced another debut novel about the conflicts of being gay and Muslim, in this finely crafted novel with a strong individual voice. Matthew Griffin's Hide (Bloomsbury USA) skillfully investigated another largely unexamined gay niche, the committed older gay couple facing late-life realities.
Insofar as poetry must at least qualify as not nonfiction, it can't be said often or loudly enough that in 2016 a great new gay poet was "born." Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong �" whose voice is both, yet who does in fact strike universal chords �"knocked everybody out with his first published collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press). Especially if you're a "don't read poetry" type, don't miss this.