There's been lots of talk around the water cooler here at the ol' B.A.R. about how —and how much, be it novel, memoir, or movie— the drug-fueled, sex-driven, gay coming-of-age story sure has become a thing. The once-sensational subject matter has become de rigueur, to the point that the topic, such as one could call it that, may have drowned in its own success (or is it excess?). Then along comes a debut novel like August Thompson's "Anyone's Ghost" (Penguin Press) to show that there's still life in the old girl.
The twist Thompson gives his story is that the protagonist, Theron David Alden, inhabits the soul of a young, perhaps bisexual man ensorceled by a straight man —named Jake, of course— who gives indications that his own sexual proclivities are, if not up for grabs, malleable, something that can be worked with.
Spoiler: both men end up in intimate relationships with women, unusually tolerant, accepting women, while embers of their same-sex flame continue to smolder, with and without smoke.
For gay readers, "Anyone's Ghost" offers something that doesn't turn up much in today's gay literary fiction: a steady look at the chronically unstable chemistry that is man-man love beyond categories. The novel obliterates the tired cliché that bisexual men simply haven't fessed up and live lives of inauthenticity and, likely, boredom.
Thompson's tale is, if not altogether original, an exploration of the notion that it ain't necessarily so. Gay men whose first attraction was to straight men, a secret love that holds the potential for consummation, will recognize themselves in Thompson's well-drawn characters. Gay men whose favorite flavor in men remains straight might find in "Anyone's Ghost" the sacred text they've long awaited. Who, after all, can claim to be the arbiter of honesty?
Brownies, booze & rehab
The plot turns on the unlikely meeting of the two men —boys, really, when they first meet. The issue of a fairly typical American divorce, Alden is preparing for a dull summer with his father in the prearranged, agreed-upon (except by Davey, as his father insists on calling him) elaboration of custody.
His preparation is a baggie of pot brownies which, when his father discovers them, are confiscated as the first stage of Davey's rehabilitation, the follow-up being Davey's being dragooned into a job at a hardware store owned by a friend of his father's.
Jake, it turns out, is the rest of the store's staff. The two work out their initial discomfort with each other over joints in the shade of a dumpster, and their subsequent friendship is based, if not fueled, by phenomenal amounts of booze. The will-they-or-won't-they tension is both the water in which they swim and the undertow that threatens to drown them.
Even before the two meet, Theron —as he becomes increasingly fond, even insistent of being called— has confided to the reader his attraction to boys. "I was used to that pining then, where I was more interested in the beauty of boys than girls because I wished so badly that I were them."
Later, he confides, "As far as I knew, Jake had never had a queer thought in his life." So, Jake's jagged masculinity is both attractive and worrying, but mostly attractive. Nothing so busies Davey boy, at 15 still an underdeveloped teenager, as walking the tightrope between the power of the attraction and the twinned fear (or is it excitement?) of discovery.
An older but hardly wiser Theron looks back at the pair's exploits at the store, musing, "I was happy to have a buddy back in my life. Anything else was a supernova of indulgence that I could only look at for seconds. I had no indication that he was queer —everything I could glean about his life, outside the intimated moments from seven years before, said he wasn't. But within my microcosmic ritual, I would afford myself brief imaginings of a culmination of our romance."
To complete the picture, from the start Jake lets on that he's in some degree of matrimony with a woman named Jess. Theron, we learn, once relocated to New York post-Jake, finds himself in a relationship with a woman named Lou, the many remarkable aspects of whom are capped by her tolerance of at least most of Theron's foibles and her willingness to meet them with humor, suspecting as she does his passion-inflected obsession with Jake. Thompson leaves no doubt that both couples' intimacy is genuine, the sex real if on the wane as happens in most if not all romantic relationships.
Things go wrong
The reader knows that tragedy is afoot from the novel's first sentence: "It took three car crashes to kill Jake." That Theron is in the first two of them with him only highlights his agony at learning, through someone else's DM not even directed toward him, that Jake, driving an 18-wheeler that has overturned, has met the same fate as his cargo of crabs now crawling over each other in a red-flecked stream.
Jake's fatal crash is adumbrated by his drunkenly driving off the road with Theron in the passenger seat. You feel Theron's horror at seeing his secret beloved's body smashed, a bone sticking out of his thigh, his slow recovery anything but assured. In its early days, "I had moments of that abandonment anxiety, but none of it stuck. We now shared a time together, a pain and a secret. On top of the love I felt for him, these were ties that felt invincible."
Along the way in Thompson's oddly action-packed novel, other catastrophes overtake the two, including a robbery and an LSD trip gone wrong. But none more dramatic than a hurricane that lands them in the literal, power-outage darkness of Theron's New York apartment, where, eventually, boozy, druggy goings-on lead to sex.
Thompson reports that moment in gritty strokes:
"[Jake] pulled me toward him, kissing me hard enough that his teeth raked over my canker sore. It ruptured, and a little of my blood mixed with the ash on his spit, but I didn't care... It is a strange feeling to have something you've always wanted, particularly when it is something so private."
The sex is reported in fresh, if sometimes revolting, language. The awkwardness of the inevitable "I love you" confessions from both —perhaps tellingly, first from Jake —is central. The pages about their "romance" are the most compelling even in a novel this carefully crafted. Thompson's honesty about the slithery nature of forbidden love and its consequences outshines the protestations and prevarications of the two men whose lives have tumbled together, innocently enough but destined for tragedy.
The single most remarkable aspect of this compulsively readable novel is Thompson's willingness to delve into both physical and emotional details that a lesser writer would dodge. Even the frequent descriptions of the heavy metal music both men love and the binding force it has in their relationship turns up gold where another writer might find only slag.
There are countless moments when the writing comes close to showing off. For example, Theron encapsulates his problems with money (a recurrent theme) thus: "Money was bad with me —we never enjoyed each other's company."
But the surprises in the sentences that, clearly, have been around the block, are outstripped by the depths at which Thomas explores in the mash-up of gay and straight —as if either denominator told the whole story.
'Anyone's Ghost,' by August Thompson. Penguin Press, 308 pages, $28. www.penguinrandomhouse.com
www.august-thompson.com
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