Merlis, Mark. American Studies. New York: Penguin, 1996.

What's mostly interesting about this book is the way it looks at the 1950s' effect on gay adults of varying ages. A gay history text I've been reading tells numerous detailed stories about the extent to which gay men were outed or cornered by the McCarthy witch hunts, which succeeded in removing from government positions far more gay men and women than actual communists—entrapment being the chief tactic.

The story of the novel is simple. It’s the plot that’s complex. Reeve, a scholarshipped charity case at a small college in the Northeast somewhere, is taken under the wing of Tom Slater, a professor of American Studies who has published The Invincible City, a revered-though-outdated critical tome that seems to encompass the entirety of American literature. Tom’s relationship with Reeve is mostly chaste, and he (Tom) eventually falls in love with a sturdy, athletic boy named Jimmy. This love is returned, leading after a few years to a sneaky operation on the part of the school’s president to get Tom fired. The operation is successful, and without much recourse, Tom commits suicide.

This all happens in the 1950s, and is retold in intermittent flashbacks by Reeve in 1989. He’s lying in a hospital bed the morning after being beaten and robbed in his own home by a trick he picked up at a local bar. After asking Howard, a friend, for books to read, Howard brings Tom’s book, and this sets his mind in motion. Reeve’s retelling of the past is both circuitous and constructed; he repeats certain scenes and landmark events, and much of Tom’s life he wasn’t himself present for (e.g., Tom’s suicide), and so much of it is guesswork and myth, Reeve telling himself the story of Tom he thinks he most wants to hear.

I didn’t much care for this novel, I think mostly because Tom’s story wasn’t ever very compelling. Sure, it was interesting to see that gay life and culture were both named and, in a sense, thriving in the Fifties, despite all the oppression and secrecy, but during the passages where Reeve would dip into the past I kept wanting him to reveal more about himself. And I think the narrative removal that happens here (by which I mean the way it’s like The Great Gatsby in Reeve doing the first-person narrating about Tom, who remains mysterious) isn’t as unified and elegant as is it in the Fitzgerald novel. Not too many people talk about Tom, or at least, if they do, few to none of them are quoted. And as I said above, there’s a lot about Tom that Reeve can’t ever know, and yet he needs to dramatize these things in scene. As such, the storytelling is sketchy and speculative. Reeve admits as much, but it wasn’t enough to absorb me in his telling.

I did, though, enjoy the writing itself. It’s at all times superb, both in the language of its description and the smart wording of its ideas. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The boy in the next bed lies sprawled atop the sheets, his gown riding up on his heroic thighs, an inch or so short of indecency. I would stare, but he is on my blind side and it hurts a little to turn my head. They have tapped me like a sugar maple: a vial taped to my forehead, over the bandaged eye, is collecting some fluid I apparently don’t require. Sap, sapience. When my head is empty it will cease to ache.

Indeed, the novel could be read as Reeve’s long attempt, over three days, to empty his head. I think he succeeds.

One of the problems, or maybe questions or puzzles are better words, filling that head is the problem of the straight man. To the gay man, the straight man is object of both oppression and adoration (though, of course, in different directions). I mean by this that Reeve isn’t just in lust with the boy in the hospital bed next to his, he’s in full love with him, if only for his physicality. At the same time, as Reeve writes, these straight men that draw his attractions "own the world. They can do whatever they want and declare it normal by simple force of numbers" (206). This tension is made manifest in Reeve’s trick: he realized all along that the boy he was eyeing in the bar was straight, but the thrill of access was too great to pass up, and, of course, it led in his nearly being killed. This novel is very much aware that to tell oneself that one loves men is to realize that one loves all men, or could potentially love all men—gay or straight. And then it’s aware of the danger of this. "I think there has never been a night," Reeve writes, "when I wasn’t a little afraid ... that [a trick] might turn on me and beat me up. Give me the licking, not that I deserved, but that I somehow was bound to get, in this world that belongs to them" (197).

It’s in the end a sad book, even though Reeve comes out of it okay, with a new plan for a new life ahead of him. I just finished it an hour ago, and right now it feels like a book about limitations and frustrations—being gay as being a member of a close-knit community, yes, but also as finding oneself in a kind of trap. Reeve is not, and never has been, in a loving, committed relationship, and come the end of the novel Merlis doesn’t suggest he ever will be. And I guess what I’m getting at is that this lack of a relationship is never presented in a liberating, down-with-monogamy way. Instead it comes across as a sad but inexorable consolation for this life that Reeve chose.