The novel opens with the protagonist, Andrew (Andy) Nocera) being tried in court for being caught “giving a blow job off Interstate 85 one hot summer night”.The sentence is one year’s probation, during which there must be no more arrests, compulsory attendance of counselling, and then the record will be expunged. As Andy’s wife, Alice, has thrown him out of their house and marriage, Andy returns home to live with his widowed mother, while being a very successful if reluctant travelling salesman. His mother has arranged counselling sessions for him with a Catholic priest, who is “fully certified in his speciality by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology”, and who unsettles Andy by not conforming to type and managing to provoke painfully honest disclosures.
This is a story about how a homosexual man living in North Carolina, who has not come out of the closet, lives a double life, happily married to a loving woman while indulging in sexual trysts with multiple men throughout the years. It is the story of how an intelligent, capable man juggles his life when he feels he has to hide a key aspect of his identity and yet perform it constantly. It discloses why and how a homosexual man feels obliged not to come out of the closet, and the resultant double life:
I’d waited my entire life to hear another man speak them but had made conscious, deliberate choices to ensure I never would. […] all that careful planning – compartmentalizing, rationalizing, justifying, avoiding, excusing, lying […] my fear of the risks of intimacy, the possibility of rejection, still held me back. The only thing more terrifying than losing my home, my job, my good name, was the very real possibility of losing my heart.
p185
Andy meets his wife, Alice, in college, where he studies comparative literature. He explains that he married her for all the wrong reasons – feeling she has rescued him,
I think the unspeakable urges and desires have been banished forever by my perfect married life. I am a husband, her husband She believes in my kisses, my lovemaking, my devotion, and if she believes, they must be real.
p166
Andy is aware his wife also marries him for the wrong reasons, because she loves his weakness and need for protection,
She’s spent her life in the shadow of her overbearing father and her haughty older sisters, and the brash, the strong, and the self-reliant do not appeal to her. She wants someone to love like a puppy, someone who will lick her hand in gratitude when she scratches him under the chin. She is twenty-four years old, too young to understand the puppy is going to strain at its leash, snip at her ankles, and piss on her rugs.
p167
It is also partly to defy her father that Alice insists on marrying Andy. Andy takes a job in her father’s company, because it pays well, and leads his double life, while trying to make his wife happy by playing the good husband.
Divorced (“without fault, without blame”), Andy lives with his mother who has Stage 4 cancer; his younger sister Regina also re-entering his life. Andy had a fraught relationship with his father, who knew of Andy’s proclivities without wanting to acknowledge them out of shame; his relationship with his mother is good, however. She seems wise and accepting and able to make a lot of space for her son. Actually, all the women in Andy’s life are kind – Alice is remarkably kind, always defending him, even during and after divorce; and Regina his sister is kind, also defending him in childhood, and still trying to forge a relationship with him in adulthood despite her own angsts. And oddly enough, Andy hardly has any significant men in his life. His father’s lack of acceptance has clearly hurt, his father-in-law’s contempt is met with cynicism and returned contempt, he respects but dislikes and yet depends on his priest/psychotherapist; only at the end of the novel, does Andy mentor his cousin’s homosexual son and strike up a healthy relationship with a man, but not with a heterosexual man.
The novel is full of sordid sexual encounters and unnecessarily crude language. There is absolutely nothing sexy or erotic in the way this novel is presented. By the lights of this author, homosexual intercourse is apparently mostly hurried, selfish, often violent, often demeaning, often taking place in unpropitious, seedy, sometimes outright disgusting venues – public toilets, as often as not. There are moments of friendship and tenderness, but by and large, it seems to be awkward, opportunistic, stolen, forbidden fumbles in any hole or corner available, a physical need or itch rather than an expression or commitment or a bonding. The blurb celebrates this book for unflinching reveal, “achingly honest”, for daring to lift the lid on the bleakness of life in the closet, but there are times when the author seems to have conflated honesty with unnecessary crudity. That said, this debut novel does once in awhile show glimpses of a real ability to write: for instance, describing how Andy remembers their shared childhood differently from his sister, Mendocino employs beautiful imagery and well chosen words:
she has no recollection of this life-changing-event. It’s as lost to her as a single grain of sand tossed back onto the beach, indistinguishable and irretrievable
p258
Mendocino would do well to continue employing such thoughtful communications, rather than simply trying to rub his reader’s faces in things as a way of presenting brutal realities. There are more subtle, elegant, and effective ways of representation, after all.
Recent Comments