Literary Pride!

I’m not Mr. Literary in general. Some of this comes down to my days at the bookstore, where I had zero choice but to keep up to date with “important” books and while I appreciate the Literary genre, I often find it relentlessly depressing, and when it comes down to it, I tend to read for enjoyment, and I’ve never quite made that jump to cathartic reading based on suffering, pain, or loss (this is also why my horror reading is pretty slight, to be honest). I used to trust wider-read people to nudge me in the direction of literary works that were built mostly on hope. Often, I found I enjoyed the literary fictions that would honestly have been just at home on genre shelves: Timothy Findley’s “Headhunter,” say, or pretty much every one of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novels—magical realism was my jam.

When I look over everything I’ve written the idea of literary fiction falls even further out of reach. Maybe, if I squint just right, Of Echoes Born might kinda/sorta slide in there in places? I don’t know. Honestly, I think it’s on the spec-fic shelf where it belongs.

All that to say—and maybe attempt to explain or excuse—often not being able to say much more than “this was amazing” or “I loved it” when I read literary fiction. Much like poetry, it’s a category that I feel so far from clever enough to comment upon that I get imposter syndrome the moment I try to review a title.

But, it’s Pride Month, and when I wandered over to my bookshelves to look at the titles there I realized I had two right there on the shelf I wanted to talk about that were absolutely some of the finest, most literary writing I’ve ever read, even if you couldn’t drag an actual definition out of me as to what counts as “literary” in the first place.

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It will likely surprise exactly zero of you who’ve been around here any length of time were I to state my first choice here is a collection of linked stories, but guess what? My first choice here is a collection of linked stories. (In fact, I reviewed them one by one during my Short Stories 365 project a few years back).

Lot by Bryan Washington is freaking amazing. I know I’ve mostly tried to avoid cheering on books this month that have a massive readership, and I also know that Barack freaking Obama suggested people check out this book, but look: it’s incredible. And as a collection of short fiction (and/or a mosaic novel), it was an experience I savoured a tale at a time, even as I wanted to keep going. That the character was also a Black and Latino queer boy-becoming-a-man narrative? About a third (or more?) of the stories have the boy-to-man’s voice, and the rest shift for the characters around him, giving you angled perspectives that paint this incredible whole by the time you close the cover.

Look, just go read it, if you haven’t already.

In the city of Houston – a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America – the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows, resenting his older sister’s absence. And discovering he likes boys.

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

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Next up, I’m going to go back quite a few years, and to when I was a young bookseller back in 2001, and Jamie O’Neill came into the store and offered to sign our copies of At Swim, Two Boys, and I basically had a complete nervous meltdown trying to speak to him like a human being. Amusingly, years later, I’d bump into him at another literary event, and he said—incredibly graciously, given the stammering and awkwardness of our first encounter—”Oh, I remember you. I think I sensed you were also queer at the time.”

To be clear, At Swim, Two Boys is one of those literary books I mentioned where the end result is bittersweet at best, but the journey, and the language, and the relationship between said two boys is gorgeous and so beautifully written even as I knew where I was careening, I couldn’t look away.

‘Weren’t you never out for an easy dip?’ he asked . . . ‘I don’t mean the baths, I mean with a pal. For a lark like.’

Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of Dublin rock where gentlemen bathe in the scandalous nude, two boys meet day after day. There they make a pact: that Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, they will swim the bay to the distant beacon of the Muglins rock, to raise the Green and claim it for themselves. As a turbulent year drives inexorably towards the Easter Rising of 1916 and Ireland sets forth on a path to uncertain glory, a tender, secret love story unfolds.

Written with verve and mastery in a modern Irish tradition descended from James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, At Swim, Two Boys is a shimmering novel of unforgettable ambition, intensity and humanity.

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Do you have a queer literary favourite? I know I tend to be pretty genre-fic around here, but drop them in the comments, as I’m always on the lookout.