Reviewing Literary Fiction With Gay Male Protagonists: A Series
The authors are male and female, gay and straight
I don’t know if they constitute an official genre or not, but over the past few years I have been reading an astonishingly large number of what I call gay-themed literary novels, some of which merit — and have indeed received — great praise for their depiction, often in beautiful, poetic language, of the inner and outer lives and relationships of gay-male characters.
In this Prism & Pen series, I will introduce works of gay literary fiction to potential readers, to lovers of literary fiction, gay and straight. The novels I review will be works that have impressed me (or, in one or two cases, not impressed me that much) with how sensitively, how realistically, how poetically they portray the lives of their gay characters and the worlds those characters inhabit.
We who read literary fiction are well aware of what it does for us: it carries us beyond ourselves and our own worlds, large and small, and transports us deeply into the lives and minds of new people. It introduces us to unexplored places, new ideas, old conflicts in new clothing, other cultures, other eras.
And as we watch characters who might not be like us, whom we might not befriend if they were real, as we see them struggle with doubt, fear, grief, loneliness, we might, perhaps unwittingly, become a wee bit more empathetic to those who are different from us.
A female protagonist drawn by a female author might teach (male?) readers about some of the challenges faced by women in a world still dominated by men. A main character who is forced to live in poverty could cause a reader to drop a loonie or a dollar bill into the homeless person’s coffee tin.
For the straight reader, gay fiction can offer a glimpse into the life of a nephew, a co-worker, a teacher, even a priest or minister.
Gay fiction, for gay men, offers a different experience. Well, I haven’t actually talked to a lot of — okay, any — gay men about this, but it does offer a different experience to me. It reveals our history, in its pain and in its glory, it affirms our own struggles by showing us the trials of others in our tribe, it validates us as people who belong, people who love and whose hearts are broken, who are brilliant and cruel, wildly creative and tragically self-destructive.
The sexuality of the eponymous protagonist of Shuggie Bain, even as it is manifested when he is a young boy, adds a layer to the suffering he endures daily as the son of an alcoholic mother and an absent father, to the humiliation of hopeless, grinding, never-ending poverty. As gay people, we can identify with that layer of suffering, and the identification brings us closer to Shuggie and makes the experience of reading Stuart’s novel more poignant, more real.
In this review series, I will look at historical fiction (In Memoriam, Solomon’s Crown, The House of Doors, Days Without End), novels set in the time of AIDS (My Government Means to Kill Me, The Great Believers), stories about gay writers (The Master, The Magician, Arctic Summer, Leading Men), works about the gay immigrant experience (The Clothesline Swing, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, The Foghorn Echoes), books about friendship (A Little Life, The Rachel Incident) and much more.
The treasury of gay literary fiction is a rich one.
As a gay man, I tend to read fiction about gay male characters; of course, I read other literary fiction as well. I have also written a novel and plan to write more, so I am keen to read and closely re-read outstanding works of gay fiction in order to improve my own writing.
The great majority of fiction reviewed in this blog, then, will be stories about gay men. I have also read The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and found it to be an engrossing story, so I plan to review that book and read and review more of her work and the work of other writers of lesbian literary fiction.
I hope the articles I write will inspire lovers of literary fiction to read some of the novels reviewed. And I look forward to readers’ insightful (and respectful, please) comments on my reviews and on the books discussed.
