The book succeeds in shedding light on several topics I was unfamiliar with, there came a point where the constant stylistic flourishes and "unconventional structure" got in the way though. It's difficult to gauge how much I was actually enjoying the reading experience. This seems to be a common theme with many newer books I read, where style seems to serve little aside for the novel insisting upon itself. It's not a complete failure of a novel- I just think it's very full of itself and a bit mid. This kind of metanarrative semi-fiction book frustrates me because at points I think I'd prefer to just actually inform myself of the reality rather than bother with some half-executed literary exercise.

I found the framing narrative of the narrator and Juan to be weak, and while the characters are meant to represent some sort of dialogue between generations of queerness and erasure of stories and past identities, I would have preferred the theme to be explored less abstractly. The narrator, as a self-insert by the author, had a frustrating sense of ego that overshadowed more compelling topics. It did not feel intimate, just conceited. Jan Gay as a person was the most compelling aspect of the novel for me, but I didn’t feel the cinema-inspired storytelling of her fictional biographical chapters fully landed. The structure felt more like an intellectual exercise than an engaging narrative.

The most engaging part of the novel for me were the endnotes, referring back to the various clippings scattered throughout the book. However, flipping between the main text and these footnotes felt tedious and structurally frustrating as none of them are labelled as you are reading. I assume the author’s intent was to keep the metafictional elements alive until the very end, but I found that Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus did a more effective job of maintaining the "bit" throughout, staying more consistently entertaining through the endnotes.

Ultimately, I didn’t feel emotionally connected to the writing. The prose struck me as somewhat rote—more focused on serving the nonlinear structure or mfa ostentatiousness than the experience of reading page-to-page—and often felt stilted. The blackout poetry and actual scans/mythos of Homosexual Tendencies were, in my opinion, more compelling. I really wished the book had explored a counternarrative beyond a few scans of blackout poetry, or the notion of the control of narrative further, rather than relegating it to a cheeky endnote. Even a more thorough reinvigoration of the subjects’ stories would have been more engaging to me. The author makes a case for this existing to tell the story of Juan but is cagey to that person's existence and I just found it uncompelling.

Blackouts

Loading Description

Tags

Bookshelves

Threads

Quotes

Reviews

Somewhat Masturbatory Autoeroticism

Lists