Distortion (Gay Men's Fiction)

Rating:
Summary: Beachy does it again
Review: Having loved Beachy's The Whistling Song, I impatiently waited for his next novel.....

Distortion is the perfect title for his latest book. Like all the interference from outside sources that invade our lives, Beachy tells a brutally honest and disturbing story. Beachy is a master of words. Every passage, every paragraph is a detailed and descriptive journey. The story itself is told in a dream-like or drug induced tale. It's a modern day 'On The Road' of the soul. Though the reading is complicated because of rich detail and sudden turns, the words connect with me so deeply.

I will read and reread this novel many times to capture its true depth and will probably discover something new with each reading.

Rating:
Summary: brief summary
Review: If Dante Alighieri and James Joyce were to caroom through the seven circles of L.A. in a Greyhound bus, pursued by a bevy of graduate-student imps condemned to retranslate "Notes from Underground" into ever more modern English, the result might be this book.

Rating:
Summary: is this realism?
Review: This book is very lifelike, in the sense that life is grand and tragic and bursting with unexpected details, full of missed chances, frequently an unexpected hoot. As in life, the story goes trailing cosmic debris -- a San Francisco driver drawn off course by the seductive disembodiment of fog, an afterlife no more organized than this one, and the odd deus ex machina back from the dead. Also very lifelike are the sheer volume of things and tangents and the disconnect between intention and result. Characters bent on murder, rape and various kinds of exploitation wind up doing relative good, while others wreak destruction trying to love or save or bless. There are moral jury-hangers like the guy seduced by his son who dumps him in a hotel room and runs. There are charming moments like the one before a plane crash when a little boy swallows a hatchling snake to protect it, then remembers the causticity of the stomach and takes up its brother elsewise. Johns, relatives, exploiters and passing weird strangers come and go, a wedding cake explodes, a team of mermaids seek the black box of a fallen airplane. The reader wanders in the full illusion of freedom from scene to scene and mind to mind through a series of stream-of-consciousness narrations by highly disparate characters. In addition to the young hustler protagonist and the woman drawn to fog, we hear from a pair of young women struggling to manage the mentally disabled children in a typically underfunded home, the boy fond of snakes and guiltily fantasizing fellow passengers, and an indie film nebbish addicted to pointless immortalization of this or that "complex, fascinating" derriere. Speaking of which, this book gives a variant meaning to the phrase cum laude, perhaps not new. Scholars of the genre may find a great deal of learned discourse in the book. If you're stuck for a lit class paper, try the men's johns as zonae epiphanae or see what you can make of the novel as a depiction of God's brain by elaborating the metaphor "a dendritic line of ants."