| | | Courtesy of Simon & Schuster |
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There’s a reason we talk about gay pride: It’s a cri de coeur, a counter to an understanding of gayness as a matter of shame. Hard to know, then, what to make of the subtitle of Adam Mars-Jones’s slim new novel, Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem.
Box Hill is the story of Colin. He’s chubby, bespectacled, clumsy, and a little awkward. We meet him the day he turns 18, when he literally trips over a man named Ray while tromping through the woods. “Ray always made that clear: Colin didn’t fall for me, he fell over me.” This initial meeting leads to an … assignation. There’s a reader who will find the book’s frank treatment of sex discomfiting; I confess I blushed.
But Colin is hard not to love, or identify with: “The thing I’d never been able to imagine about sex, as it might apply to me, was how anyone would ever have the patience to show me what to do.” Ray, a leather-clad motorcycle enthusiast some unknown number of years older than Colin, takes the boy home. There, Ray is cool, barely speaking to Colin, who is blown away by the well-appointed flat where this stranger lives. Ray’s indifference is an act of seduction, an exercise of pure power; there’s a reason Colin is so rapturous as he describes Ray’s leather apparel. The two go to bed, of course, but when they move in together, Colin mostly sleeps on the floor, less Ray’s lover than his pet.
Is this truly a story about low self-esteem? Mars-Jones is writing about the relationship between power and sex: Ray’s cool withholding, Colin’s willing subservience. Again, this plays out in ways that will unsettle some readers, as when Ray bids Colin to provide sexual favors for his poker buddies, or when the two have intercourse by the side of the road, in view of passing motorists.
For all the novel’s interest in sex—and there is a lot of that—Box Hill is an unexpectedly moving book. I don’t want to spoil what transpires, but it’s genuinely sad. The story skips rather audaciously through time, and we get to see Colin as an older man, looking back on his formative years spent with Ray. Gay, straight, or whatever adjective suits it best, love is complicated and weird. This is really more novella than anything, a mere 120 pages, but it made me sadder than a book has in quite some time.
By contrast, Eleanor Crewes’s memoir in drawings, The Times I Knew I Was Gay, is a sweet and happy confection—“not a handbook for coming out,” as the author writes in the foreword, but a document of her own particular experience. In a sweet and almost naïve hand, Crewes draws herself as a girl, still childlike as her peers disappear into adolescent concerns like boys and bras. “I felt as though I had two selves,” she writes: “one was the person I needed to be with my new friends, and the other was who I had always been with my old friends and my family.” This is a conundrum typical of adolescence, probably, but I remember it well and was made wistful and uncomfortable in equal measure.
She recalls both her pals and her bullies, noting, “Everyone seemed so hungry to know everything about you. But I didn’t even seem to know myself anymore.” This is the strange phenomenon of the closet in a nutshell: how any person could so fail to understand themselves. It happens. In recounting her own circuitous route to self-acceptance, Crewes may not be sketching out a road map for other readers, but no single text could do that. Nevertheless, queer readers will nod in recognition, and straight readers should probably consider this and other stories of coming out just as closely.
Crewes’s own story involves unsatisfactory romances with men, hesitant coming out, and then retreating back into the closet, but this isn’t a queer narrative that ends in tragedy—we’ve had enough of those. It concludes with love and joy. If those are too often elusive, it’s worth remembering this isn’t a fairy tale but a true story. It gets better indeed. |
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| We know that Louise Glück won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, but I still think it’s worth reading Alex Shephard on the horse race. Then read Dan Chiasson on the poet’s work. |
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| “This was a show where Black women were either strategically placed (as, say, Black best friends) or altogether absent—a show that relied on a Black-woman aesthetic without Black women, and working-class style without working-class realities.” Robin M. Boylorn reflects on the phenomenon that was Keeping Up With the Kardashians. |
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| Listicles can charm; at least, I thought this one did. |
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—Rumaan Alam, contributing editor |
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