Peck, Dale. Martin and John. New York: FSG, 1993.

A collection of stories billed as a novel, and formed into a kind of novel by making all the characters have the same names. To wit: John is our protagonist, for the most part. Often the first-person narrator, he's young and gay and grows up in Kansas. His mother is named Bea. In some stories, Bea is dead. In some stories Henry is his father. In some stories, Henry is abusive. In all the stories, Martin is the beloved.

The result is almost a fantasia of all the possible forms a gay relationship might take. Peck takes a page from Genet in this regard. But in the stories'/chapters' presentation—separate titles, radically shifting point of view and settings—Martin and Johnisn't as cohesive as Our Lady of the Flowers. Our attempts to connect the John of "Blue Wet-Paint Columns" and the John of "The Search for Water" are futile. Causality is tossed aside, but never for any great effect.

It's a shame that whoever published this book decided it had to be a novel. Many of these stories just rip right through the reader. They have such a drive and energy at times. Here's the end of a story where Martin is both Bea's boyfriend and eventually John's bedmate:

All he ever wanted was both of us, and of course he could have neither in the end. That's like Martin, like his tears, his touches, his other empty words. You can have your dreams, he'd said in the kitchen, of how life should be and what your ideal lover should look like and how your first time should go, but he knew—and I do too, now—that you'll never get it, or never be able to hold on to it if you do. Not in this life, he'd told me: only when you're dead. (81)

Reading the book like a novel (which is to say moving from one story to the next as though merely time is passing) ruins all this great effect.

You may recall that Dale Peck used to be the book reviewer for The New Republic, the one who famously wrote that Rick Moody was the "worst writer of his generation." These days he write a column on the movies for fag-rag Out, and hasn't published a novel in a while. Maybe his career's over. Maybe karma's real.