Rating: 60% | ★★☆☆☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized--has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories--moments of joy and oblivion--and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? Spoiler-Free Review: Justin Torres returns, more than a decade after We the Animals, with Blackouts: a sprawling, arcane overview of queer culture in America. It has been difficult for any reviewer to adequately describe what Blackouts is. Hugh Ryan of the New York Times speaks of a mix of "erasure poetry and queer history." Charles Arrowsmith of The Washington Post considers it "fable-like." Sam Sacks comes closest to the core of the novel: "Instead of illumination, “Blackouts” invites readers into the smaller consolation of shared sadness. Even if it had something transcendent to impart, after all, we would forget it anyway." It is this mutability, this fundamentally unplaceable aura, that gives the novel its strength. It is also this mutability that makes the novel so difficult to enjoy—though that may be too reductive a word to describe the experience of reading Blackouts. There is such a thing as a lack of alignment between the reader and the story, and it happened in this case. Torres smartly and proudly does not condescend to the reader's lack of knowledge about the real-life Jan Gay, or even to the reader's lack of knowledge about the queer struggle worldwide. For me, lying outside the intended audience of this book, the characters felt feeble and the plot, tangled and unclear. It is difficult to know where the narrator and Juan Gay have emerged from in the vast universe, and where they may be going. These absences of a static origin and a sure future would be sobering if it were not for the fact that they melt into the equally ill-defined fabric of Jan Gay's life. Blackouts is fraught with suspense; though their relationship is never explained, the tension between Juan and the narrator propels the novel. Throughout the story the reader understands the narrator's premature mourning and Juan's preternaturally calm retelling of Jan Gay's life. Yet, as much as this tension forms the attraction of the novel, it never quite finds its terminus. The reader completes the novel with much the same curiosity about the narrator and Juan present in the beginning. In formal terms, the narrator and Juan's interactions form the frame story for Blackouts, but Jan Gay's story vies for—and wins—greater attention. This unsteady relationship between the twin strands of the plot, along with the lack of definition in either strand, result in a novel that feelings unsettlingly incomplete and unfulfilling—though, of course, there is a case to be made for those qualities being the exact foci of Torres's project. I am perhaps not the reader for Blackouts, but I have enormous respect for what the novel aspires to and ultimately achieves.
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From the ArchiveWhile my main reviews are organized by seasons and I try to write reviews immediately after I finish reading, there are always stories that lose to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From the Archive is a redemptive collection of mini-reviews of books I read in the past that continue to captivate me.
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