Onyx

Rating:
Summary: His Own Most Personal Tragedy
Review: "Will gay writers continue writing about AIDS," someone asked Felice Picano after his brilliant "Excavating the Self in Your Writing" lecture at the Lambda Writers Festival last October. He had just spoken on memoir writing, and the core reference was his own latest novel, Onyx, about the horrors of his lover's last months of suffering and unspeakable hospital ordeal. With this novel Picano adds his voice to other memoirs of the plague-a canon including Edmund White's The Married Man, Paul Monette's Borrowed Time, Fenton Johnson's The Geography of the Heart, and my personal favorite, Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest.

Onyx may be admired from many perspectives. Few writers can approach Picano's craft. He can make a line sing. He can tug at the heart, the head, or the haunches with lyricism, humor, and lusty eroticism. His writing is deeply human, the conflicts are complex, and his stories move along and are emotionally moving. Yet I finished Onyx less disturbed, less shaken than I was prepared to be. How is it that the author of exhilarating classics like The Lure and Like People in History could write his own most personal tragedy, the loss of his life partner and soul mate, and I not be moved to tears?

The story opens with morning light through vertical blinds and ends with evening light through an airplane's window as Ray flies to the West Coast to start over after the deaths of his lover in a New York hospital and his teenage nephew, struck by a car as he runs to find his uncle. In between, Ray cares for Jesse through every crisis, and Jesse magnanimously encourages Ray to find a sexual partner since Jesse's failing health has cost them that intimacy. Ray meets a hunky, straight, blue-collar, married guy and easily seduces him-a variation on the Cowboy and the Dandy, the naive but more-than-willing-to-learn, curious-if-not-questioning innocent and the worldly sophisticate. Ray teaches Mike things he did not know, and Mike keeps coming back for more instruction. The relationship never goes beyond sex for either man.

Ray even tells Jesse what's going on, proof that mere sex cannot sully their perfect marriage. There's also a handsome plumber and a French film producer Ray attracts with innuendo and his big libido. Domestic duties, sex, career moves, and the high drama of Jesse's dying make the story lines. Nowhere has the horror of AIDS been more graphically described. Even the elaborate description of Jesse's cremation is anticlimactic to the suffering Ray saw Jesse endure.

To avoid unmitigated gloom and doom, Picano mates Ray and Mike in frequent sex scenes-like comic relief in heavy drama. The scenes sizzle, but they ill-serve, I think, the undying love the novel is about. And other problems undermine Onyx. Adele, Jesse's southern mom, is so malevolent that she's a stick-figure harridan, the stereotypical mother-in-law from Hell; a caricature without a single redeeming trait. Sometimes, too, the writing takes over the story, as in displays of musicological esoterica, and becomes its own end. The original hardback edition also contains an excessive number of textual errors, including words out of order, phrases repeated, and careless typos.

In his October lecture, Picano said that enough time must pass between events and writers' memories of them in order to make the creative transformation into fiction-time to move from uncontrolled feelings to controlled objectivity. Onyx needed a longer gestation than its ten years. I wanted to love this book. Instead, I liked it. What might have been a five-star novel by an all-star writer is only a very good three-star one.

Rating:
Summary: Losses and Loves - Never Easy
Review: Felice Picano is a gifted writer, His writing evidences intelligence and an excellent ability to tell a story. That said, I would have to say that I have come away from this book with mixes reactions.

One sense I have is that the start of the book was an exciting and engaging story. From there Picano wanders into lengthy sidetrails that have but minimal bearing on the primary story. Yet, his character development is clear and convincing. Each character is drawn boldly and visibly.

The two children who are Ray's niece and nephew are presented extremely well. Too often adult authors, don't represent kids well. It is indeed not uncommon to find kids are presented as unsophisticated and simple. They are usually neither. In Onyx, Picano presents two children (ages 9 and 13)who have a tremendous love for their uncle who is gay. They are able to understand the challenges that he is presented in his life with the impending death of his partner and convey a wonderful empathy for their own loss of Jesse, Ray's partner. They are not afraid of their uncle or of his sexuality. And, they each has a sense of humor. A wonderful representation of how most kids really are.

The protagonist Ray is well drawn and we are able to follow the joys and trials over a short period of his life with great interest. Yet, Picano rushes to an ending that is exceeding complex and full of multiple losses far too quickly. I felt like he ran out of energy or space. While the death of Jesse, his partner, is well conveyed, his niece's leukemia and his nephew's sudden death are key issues that get no more than a page and a half of attention.

While I enjoyed the book, I believe Picano did his beautiful characters an injustice by not giving each his or her full attention as the book closed.

Finally, I did not leave the book sensing much hope; perhaps and intentional representation of where Ray found himself at a most numbing time in his life.

I certainly will read Picano again. I hope he pays as much attention to his endings as he does to his beginnings.

Rating:
Summary: A Return to Creative Story Telling
Review: Felice Picano is considered to be one of gay literature's greatest assetts. I go back and forth on that judgement, mainly because his last book, Book of Lies, was so awful! It read like a tossed out script from some Aaron Spelling melodrama!

But with Onyx, you will find Picano in truly great form. The novel is crisp story telling that gets to th heart of its characters. Of love about to be lost (yes, AIDS) and the journey to go on with one's life in the face of adversity.

There are many surprise turns hear that one will read and find yourself screaming in shock. They all work. There is nothing that is contrived about this story.

While some of the "love" scenes may be something you feel you have resd before, the novel goes further to get to the heart of its characters. It doesn't just give you names to remember, but people to identify with and love or cherish them as you see fit.

Rating:
Summary: Onyx is a Jewel
Review: Felice Picano's work ranges so differently from book to book, so I was curious to see why he said in a reading event that it was "a difficult book" for him to write. While AIDS novels may have become passe, this one isn't just that, but covers the ground of painful hospital scenes, and how it and other tragedies disintegrate a happy extended family. While the mother-in-law character embodies all that is evil in homophobia, and some may consider her a stereotype, I found her all too realistic for the era. The love affair between Ray and studly "straight" Mike is both erotic and touching, capturing the embodiment of the type of men that fill New York and cause quite a distraction for gay guys. Picano dispenses with some of the cleverness of his earlier work, and has written a touching saga of love and loss. It's also a bit of a love note to New York, and perhaps a reflection of his own move from NYC to Los Angeles. With all the music references (the narrator Ray runs a classical music publishing company), it's too bad there isn't an accompanying soundtrack!

Rating:
Summary: Onyx is a Jewel
Review: Felice Picano's work ranges so differently from book to book, so I was curious to see why he said in a reading event that it was "a difficult book" for him to write. While AIDS novels may have become passe, this one isn't just that, but covers the ground of painful hospital scenes, and how it and other tragedies disintegrate a happy extended family. While the mother-in-law character embodies all that is evil in homophobia, and some may consider her a stereotype, I found her all too realistic for the era. The love affair between Ray and studly "straight" Mike is both erotic and touching, capturing the embodiment of the type of men that fill New York and cause quite a distraction for gay guys. Picano dispenses with some of the cleverness of his earlier work, and has written a touching saga of love and loss. It's also a bit of a love note to New York, and perhaps a reflection of his own move from NYC to Los Angeles. With all the music references (the narrator Ray runs a classical music publishing company), it's too bad there isn't an accompanying soundtrack!

Rating:
Summary: Not ringing true....
Review: I have yet to write a review for a book that I didn't enjoy and sadly this will be my first! I was astonished to find Picano -- a literary genius from his early days as an integral part of the Violet Quill -- to the consumate favourite he has become among his legion of gay fans, was behind this book! Granted, his characters were multi-dimensional as is to be expected, but some of the storylines seemed to veer quite literally off the page for me at least! It was expected that this was a novel about love and loss, coping and looking inside of oneself, and for the most part this is what he gives the reader. My complaint? The too-familiarly-rendered mother in law and the total disintegration of the central storyline once the central plotlines have reached their fulfilment. Why introduce a young character like Chris who to me seemed ripe for exploration in another instalment, only to have him disposed of in a manner and storyline that lost all credibility? And the mentioning of the neice with cancer... it was like he was writing for a really bad soap at the same time and accidentally got the pages mixed together. This is not one of his better pieces and I only hope that in the future that he remembers why he has such a loyal following: we love his characters

Rating:
Summary: Picano Does It Again
Review: ONYX is an amazingly fine novel from a writer who seems to grow with each published work. Though many may overlook this latest book as merely another Violet Quill opus chronicling gay life, this book is more than a solid story, more than a beautifully written novel, more than many other books in this genre. This novel is an elegantly written exploration of the quest of the individual in the 21st Century - the immediacy and inexplicable choices that death makes, how individuals deal with genetic agar plates peppered by the vagaries of childhood environments/family history/social mores/chance encounters, why we become puppets of our stage play of id/ego/superego. Picano has created thoroughly 3-dimensional characters who leap off the page as both good and bad acquaintances we've all encountered. There seems to be much autobiographical material here: how else could the author know the complexities of his characters unless he'd lived in their skins of mixed in ther minds!

ONYX, the title, refers to a life long thwarted desire for an unobtainable object (an onyx ring) that becomes available only after Charon guides the main character across the river Styx. Love, relationships, family, finding physical solace in a surrogate sexual fling, the vileness of AIDS and the accompanying tragedies encountered at the demise of a loved one whose family has never accepted the life of the victim, the true meaning of friendship, the equal vileness of cancer, of vehicular deaths, of family hate gone wild - all are components of this book. There are surprising elements that inform us of practices unknown to most of us (were you aware that you could watch a cremation with all its gothic elements?), as well as pages of simply lyrical prose becoming poetry. Picano knows how to create atmosphere, how to lead us through the complexities of nature's erratic moves, and most of all he knows how to keep our attention focused in reading a book that becomes addictive.

For those who have not had the pleasure of reading Picano, jump in and ready yourself for a ride you'll not forget. From another artistic viewpoint this book design, cover, printing choices, page layout are the work of an extraordinary craftsman. This reader finds ONYX to be his finest novel to date.....and waiting for what is next!

Rating:
Summary: Polished to a gleam!
Review: ONYX is an amazingly fine novel from a writer who seems to grow with each published work. Though many may overlook this latest book as merely another Violet Quill opus chronicling gay life, this book is more than a solid story, more than a beautifully written novel, more than many other books in this genre. This novel is an elegantly written exploration of the quest of the individual in the 21st Century - the immediacy and inexplicable choices that death makes, how individuals deal with genetic agar plates peppered by the vagaries of childhood environments/family history/social mores/chance encounters, why we become puppets of our stage play of id/ego/superego. Picano has created thoroughly 3-dimensional characters who leap off the page as both good and bad acquaintances we've all encountered. There seems to be much autobiographical material here: how else could the author know the complexities of his characters unless he'd lived in their skins of mixed in ther minds!

ONYX, the title, refers to a life long thwarted desire for an unobtainable object (an onyx ring) that becomes available only after Charon guides the main character across the river Styx. Love, relationships, family, finding physical solace in a surrogate sexual fling, the vileness of AIDS and the accompanying tragedies encountered at the demise of a loved one whose family has never accepted the life of the victim, the true meaning of friendship, the equal vileness of cancer, of vehicular deaths, of family hate gone wild - all are components of this book. There are surprising elements that inform us of practices unknown to most of us (were you aware that you could watch a cremation with all its gothic elements?), as well as pages of simply lyrical prose becoming poetry. Picano knows how to create atmosphere, how to lead us through the complexities of nature's erratic moves, and most of all he knows how to keep our attention focused in reading a book that becomes addictive.

For those who have not had the pleasure of reading Picano, jump in and ready yourself for a ride you'll not forget. From another artistic viewpoint this book design, cover, printing choices, page layout are the work of an extraordinary craftsman. This reader finds ONYX to be his finest novel to date.....and waiting for what is next!

Rating:
Summary: Poetically Dreary
Review: Onyx was my first encounter with the work of Felice Picano. I can't say that I am totally displeased with what I found.

Picano's use of lanugage is astonishing, beautiful and most of the time, flows like poetry. Unfortunately, the story that is told is uneven and loses focus.

It is extraordinarily difficult to tell a story from different perspectives and keep a reader's interest. This seemed to be major error for Onyx.

Overall, the book would have been much stronger had it kept its lens focused on Ray, who is a likeably flawed character. His journey through the various manifestations of love rings true, but the story tended to veer away from this course too often, as if the author was afraid of what he might find.

While the story of Jesse, Rays lover who is fading from life, is told with compassion and grace, it would have served a much better purpose in a separate work.

I admire Picano's effort with this book and will definitely read his past writing, but I wish I would have started with his earlier work, which I am told is much stronger.

Rating:
Summary: Poetically Dreary
Review: Onyx was my first encounter with the work of Felice Picano. I can't say that I am totally displeased with what I found.

Picano's use of lanugage is astonishing, beautiful and most of the time, flows like poetry. Unfortunately, the story that is told is uneven and loses focus.

It is extraordinarily difficult to tell a story from different perspectives and keep a reader's interest. This seemed to be major error for Onyx.

Overall, the book would have been much stronger had it kept its lens focused on Ray, who is a likeably flawed character. His journey through the various manifestations of love rings true, but the story tended to veer away from this course too often, as if the author was afraid of what he might find.

While the story of Jesse, Rays lover who is fading from life, is told with compassion and grace, it would have served a much better purpose in a separate work.

I admire Picano's effort with this book and will definitely read his past writing, but I wish I would have started with his earlier work, which I am told is much stronger.