Reading a current queer American novel is often like spotting
small-pond celebrities at crowded parties. Edmund White is unabashedly
autobiographical in The Married
Man, Felice Picano draws deeply if obliquely
from the well of the Violet Quill in The Book of Lies, and David
Leavitt
flirts cheerfully with revenge in Martin
Bauman, to recall just three recent
examples where real people (look, there's Larry Kramer!) or their
equivalents
are sprinkled throughout the plots.
Australian novelist Neal Drinnan's Quill, a two-part, dart-sharp
dig at
the based-on-real-life approach to fiction, offers a nifty, inventive
inversion of the genre. He's created a fictional author, one Elliott
Bernard, whose new novel, Je Louse (think jealous), set in 1999,
is based
with lurid, leering detail on his six torrid years with Blaise, the
narrator
of Quill, who left Elliott for a more placid relationship.
Part one, the tell-all Je Louse, focuses on the emotional mayhem
wrought by Bernard's revelations; part two, Gridiron (think gay
jock
fantasy), set in 2004 after Bernard's death from AIDS, introduces a wide
cast of characters from the now-dead author's past, including his
charmingly
befuddled mother, former boyfriend Blaise (who'd become his caretaker),
and
a catty circle of acquaintances and friends who gather after the funeral
to
dish the deceased.
Drinnan's story-within-a-story is cheeky entertainment, spotlighting
the pettiness of overnursed grudges, the generosity of old friends and
the
peculiar rites of gay "family" with stimulating precision and wicked
honesty. Both of his earlier novels, Glove Puppet and Pussy's
Bow, were
rewarding, occasionally ragged works from a distinctive, young voice.
Quill
is more grown-up work.
-- Richard Labonté
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