Monette, Paul. Afterlife. New York: Avon Books, 1990.

For the actual cover, just print the following below that image of Hockney's at left:

AFTERLIFE
A NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF BORROWED TIME
PAUL MONETTE
"Affecting... Engrossing... A radiant book" L.A. Times Book Review

Such a cover doesn't exist online though I've got the thing right in front of me. The standard cover given the book now is a lot more PG (well, because gay men are depicted it'd probably get PG-13), and probably more appropriate. Not only is there no naked men sunbathing in Monette's novel, but I don't even recall any pools. And yet there's that (admittedly stunning) ass there.

I bring all this up to talk about the thing that sucks the hardest about gay literary fiction. No one, certainly not gay men, has figured out how to respectably market it. We can't market it to straight audiences—is there any other cover that could more fully prevent any straight man from picking up this book in a bookstore?—and we can't market it to gay audiences, because literary fiction has to compete with all the other books that have naked men on the covers.

You can argue this is a trend with book-marketing in general (even The River Wife's cover has a nipple on it) but you'd be exaggerating. The other thing that sucks about gay fiction is that there's such poor amount of discrimination going on. Books that I want to argue are bad books get championed as "radiant" or even "brilliant."

First I'll try to explain why this is so, and then I'll talk about why this book is bad. Here's something Susie Bright (who's most interesting on that one episode of Six Feet Under where, I think, Claire's aunt threw that bitchin' party) had to say in the film version of Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet (I'm paraphrasing):

When you are growing up gay, you're so starved for images, for representations of yourself. And you basically sit through any movie just for the part where the lesbian comes in. You get so used to being nurtured by these crumbs.

She said it a lot less highfalutin-y than I just did, but trust me, she used the crumbs metaphor.

Monette's Afterlife isn't crumbs by any means; every central character is gay, and the three at its center are what he calls "AIDS widows" meaning they've each lost the men closest to them to the disease. It should, then, be a feast, but it's like fast food. Maybe tasty but bad for you. Um. Jesus let me can these stupid metaphors.

I am immediately distrustful of a novel in which its central character doesn't really have to worry about money or work and ends up with someone richer and more attractive than anyone who'll ever read this blog. This man, named Mark* in this novel, is there in the opening scene: "Mark's in television," says Steven, our protagonist. "Major heartthrob. Eats gorgeous men for breakfast" (10). And because this is a gay novel it's clear to everyone that we'll need to "see" this man naked, and hopefully let our stand-in have hot sex with him. And lo. And behold.

What Afterlife is then, immediately, is a fantasy. And yes, it's an important fantasy, at a time when gay men had watched so many of their friends and lovers die, one after another, from AIDS that a fantasy I'm sure was a small but welcome consolation. And I have nothing wrong with fantasies. Angels in America, which I've lavished praise on lots here, bills itself as "a gay fantasia on national themes" and I think I wouldn't have had a problem with Monette's novel if it made a similar move at the beginning. Instead it makes these weak attempts at history and contextualization. One character becomes a mild terrorist, calling in bomb threats to homophobic institutions. The novel satirizzes (I think? or maybe we're meant to honor it?) the new age culture of California in the 80s/90s. If the central plot arc wasn't such a fairy tale I could have taken these sideplots seriously.

The writing, also, is uneven. I was going to say bad, because, like: "For Steven [a travel agent] travel was over. He'd become a walking bad advertisement, like a misspelled sandwich board" (9). But then Monette surprises me with these moment of sharp observation. At a meeting for AIDS survivors: "Everyone seemed to be taking something different and was armed with newsletters and offprints, fierce as an eighth-grade science project" (75).

It's a great line, because so honest. And so why the phoniness in which all his characters are weakly dressed? And why did Richard McCann call it "an achievement of the imagination" in USA Today?

Here's a fun way to waste ten minutes. Go to your bigbox bookstore and take a look at the three shelves devoted to gay and lesbian books. Read the synopses and imagine that novels such as these were the only chance you'd get to see representations of yourself in print. Q: How quickly would you run to reality TV?
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*I've got this thing brewing in my head somewhere about gay novelists and the names they give the beloved, or like superhot ideal man, that is at the center of them all. The name always starts with M. Here we have Mark. Andrew Holleran's seminal (!!!) Dancer from the Dance has one as does Kramer's Faggots released the same year. Holleran's beloved may even just be named M. You see it in Peck's Martin and John, and potentially others. Is it that M is the first letter of "man"? Or "mom"? Paging Dr. Freud....