Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. Toronto: Emblem Editions, 1997.

The only thing this collection of stories (billed as a novel, but no way) adds to the coming-out genre is its setting: the Sri Lankan Civil War. This is probably enough. Probably, we should have variants of the coming-out novel in every possible culture of the world. But for someone who's about waist-deep in coming out novels these days, Funny Boy has so little to offer.

And the writing, despite claims from the blurbs in the back, is not exquisite; is, in fact, never very creative or beautiful. "As in a dream, I felt myself slipping into a blackness where all my thought disintegrated. The entire world became the sensation in my mouth and Shehan's tongue probing, retreating, intertwining with mine."

There seems in the plainest books of the coming-out genre to be no other way to describe a first kiss. Every word here has come from everyone else. And some of it is downright awful. "With a heavy heart, I slowly went back up to the beach." Where is the talent this book's covers promise?

This novel would be interesting had it been written in 1983, or in the year or so after the Sri Lankan conflict escalated. But for 1994 it just seems redundant.