American Gospel – Miah Jeffra (Black Lawrence Press)

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Black Lawrence Press

Coming out of the box with extremely strong books of both poetry (The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!/Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) and short stories (The Violence Almanac/Black Lawrence Press, 2021), author Miah Jeffra had a lot riding on his long-form novel debut, but talent will out, and American Gospel proves to be just as interesting and assured as his poetry and short fiction.

American Gospel is about the gentrification of an old, dilapidated Inner Harbor neighborhood in Baltimore and the redevelopment’s effect on three of its residents: Ruth, a woman escaping an abusive relationship with her husband Isaac, her young, gay son Peter, and a teacher at Peter’s school, Brother Thomas. A feeling of impermanence grows as properties are bought or seized, services are suspended, and nothing is reliable or safe anymore, culminating in a public protest against the proposed theme park that changes the lives of everyone involved.

Jeffra’s narrative has a slow build so that the reader can get to know its characters first, a wise move that results in a huge emotional payoff at the climax. And those characters are stunning, Ruth in particular. Jeffra does an amazing job of capturing her desperation, so all-encompassing it morphs into paranoia and takes perhaps the darkest turn in the book. But her son, Peter, has his own problems, including falling in love with a maybe not-so-straight boy named Jude. Brother Thomas, meanwhile, is having a crisis of faith. Jeffra handles all these viewpoints with ease, pulling each off brilliantly. You’ll find yourself hooked by these voices.

An air of decay suffuses the book from without and within, Jeffra capturing the slow urban decline with the grace and dignity inherent in a last, lost gesture as the community members gather together to protest their eradiction. Always artful yet never showy, Jeffra’s prose blows bleak air over his characters’ attempt at fighting the system–with predictable and still heartbreaking results. Neverthess, Jeffra winds it all up well, leaving no story thread unraveled.

Miah Jeffra’s American Gospel is a cautionary tale, an unflinching portrayal of greed overcoming common sense. The story is an old one, but Jeffra’s excellent writing and impeccable choices show off its evergreen relevance. I can’t think of a better book to begin your summer reading season.

JW

© 2023 Jerry L. Wheeler

Performer Non Grata – Brian Alessandro (Rebel Satori Press)

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Rebel Satori Press

The American dream of prosperity, family and fame perversely births a second, darker dream: the fantasia to escape all of the requisite pressure and exposure the primary vision leverages for ballast. Brian Alessandro lances both oily bubbles to great cinematic effect with Performer Non Grata. The novel initially serves as a satirical takedown of masculine tropes as they play out in the workplace, the family, interpersonal relationships and across an endless stream of ever-expanding social media platforms; at the center of this roiling New York City psychodrama: uber-rich and ever fuming Risk Bonaventura, a throbbing narcissist. However, as the novel unfolds, his icy wife, the controversial and tenured professor Lorna, and queer home-schooled son Theo, a budding artist, share a near equal amount of screen time. And the book often feels like a darkened theater, with our collective online projections of parched fame and thwarted desire the postmodern horror movie that fills the room with dread and longing. Though literary influences are surging just beneath the surface throughout, Alessandro’s forgoes the exhausted cliches typical of the post-modern novel, deepening the impression that film is a primary source of inspiration here. As the family self-sabotages and each character self-destructs they flee America, investing in Risk’s absurd machismo yearning to become a bullfighter in Madrid -the whole thing has the push and pull of Godard’s The Weekend. The sexual grimoire that is the final third of Performer Non Grata reads like a familial inversion of Pasolini’s Salo‘, or the 120 Days of Sodom.      

The perverse panache of the prose on display shows that Alessandro insidiously enjoys subverting the typical love triangle, as Risk’s idol, the Spanish matador Javier, first develops an online friendship with the besotted Theo before they all meet in the flesh (and I do mean flesh). In Madrid, Javier, ever the hyper-masculine player set on conquering anyone and everyone (how like Risk!), flirts with Lorna to disastrous effect. This celebrity jock, bullish in his sexual prowess and belief that he’ll get one over on these obsessive Americans, has seriously underestimated the deepening desperation of this twisted family unit. How symbolic of the vast destructive powers of American capitalism that the world laughs at us as we consume wholesale their culture, their natural resources, their young:

 “Lorna nodded. It hadn’t been lost on her that she and her husband and son were living a lurid version of their former selves. A penance. Repetition. There was dignity in the danger, a sacred peace in the peril and the debauchery. She felt at home within it, as she knew Risk had, as she knew Theo had.”   

Back to Risk. Why explore such a repellent character? In a recent article in The Gay and Lesbian Review, Alessandro explores the current state of queer literature: “the premise was that the majority of LGBT characters in literature and film are either saints or victims. Publishers and producers seem too timid to permit us more complex roles, like villains, or at least flawed antiheroes.” This gives our community a false sense of self, removing us from the larger American tapestry and thus untethered, we are left unaware just how innate is the darkness that we flippantly define as an external force. And the final chapters of the novel! I’ve not read such brutal social criticism since encountering Gary Indiana at the height of his powers. After Javier’s ruthless, porcine family is introduced, and Risk commits an atrocious, unforgiveable act, a dark crescendo is set in motion. Think Pedro Almodovar, think Francis Bacon, think about the bull and what he has to lose, and why we never really win.

Reviewed by Tom Cardamone, editor of Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book, and the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning speculative novella Green Thumb as well as the erotic fantasy The Lurid Sea and other works of fiction, including two short story collections. Additionally, he has edited The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered and co-edited Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs.

New May Releases

What’s new for your spring reading season? Here are some great new titles from some old friends and from some authors we’ve never heard before. Hey, the more voices the better. Buy/preorder at the links. If you are a publisher or an author with a new release you’d like to see get some attention in this space, please let me know at pfloydian191@hotmail.com.

From Book Brilliance:

A Lot of People Live in This House – Bailey Merlin

Buy/Preorder Here

From Fieldmouse Press:

I Thought You Loved Me – MariNaomi

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From Bywater Books:

A Long Time Dead – Samara Breger

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From Rattling Good Yarns Press:

Boy Wander: A Coming of Age Memoir – Jobert E. Abueva

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At Sea with Patrick Dennis: My Madcap Mexican Adventure with the Author of Auntie Mame – Robert Karr

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Goes On, Without the World’s Understanding – Thomas Westerfield

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From Bold Strokes Books:

Broken Fences – Jo Hemmingwood

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Never Kiss A Cowgirl – Ali Vali

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Pantheon Girls – Jean Copeland

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Roux for Two – Aurora Rey

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Starting Over – Nance Sparks

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The Accidental Bride – Jane Walsh

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Three Wishes – Anne Shade

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Undiscovered Treasures – MJ Williamz

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Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep – Lori Horvitz (New Meridien Arts)

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Indiebooks

When Lori Horvitz was twenty-one, she backpacked across Europe without a set itinerary. She arrived in Oslo, after riding a night train from Frankfort, and decided to call her family back in the States. Since this was in the days before cell phones and e-mail she had to go to an international post office and make a collect call; her mother, upon answering (on a “turquoise rotary telephone”) refused to accept the charges. Horvitz called her then-boyfriend, an anarchist, who did accept the charges. When she returned to Manhattan, she and he moved to Minneapolis, then almost immediately back to Manhattan; eventually they split up. Horvitz began to date women, starting with a British woman she met while traveling abroad.  Horvitz’s mother would die four years later, in a car accident.

This incident would haunt Horvitz (literally) for years, and she would revisit it in a workshop on financial literacy for women, with her therapist, and in her creative non-fiction: it is the title essay of her second collection of essays, Collect Call to My Mother:  Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep. As the opening essay, it establishes the basis for the rest of her collection:  her mother, sparing in money, was also sparing in affection to her daughter, and this had a profound effect on Horvitz’s search for a long-term relationship. The premature loss of her mother similarly would cause bouts of insomnia and anxiety for years afterward; Horvitz would spend years exorcising these childhood demons and adulthood ghosts.

The essays in her collection, arranged chronologically (I presume) chronicle her travels, physical, intellectual, and emotional.  Horvitz spent most of her twenties traveling, so that she “didn’t have to think about my family, or missing them, or if they thought about me. I could wander and make new friends, as if they were family.” After achieving an MFA and Ph.D., she eventually left New York and settled in Ashville, NC. When she started dating women, they were “unavailable,” either physically and/or emotionally distant. In “The Last Freight Train,” she explicitly describes how her attachment style (which she labels “anxious”) would invariably seek out women with “avoidance” attachment styles in a repetitious dance. Several essays (among them “The Gift-Giver,” “The Scent of Nag Champa,” “Three Veterinarians”) describe this dance, with unflinching honesty, which her body often recognized before her brain. (Which is not to say that there isn’t a wry humor in Horvitz’s essays: in “Search and Rescue,” she compares Internet dating to finding a new dog over the Internet.)

Of course, the level of self-awareness needed to acknowledge these insights required years of (metaphoric) wrong turns, dead ends, and running in place. But just as she was traveling away from her birth family and chaotic upbringing, she was simultaneously traveling towards self-awareness, and self-acceptance. For example, after visiting Auschwitz she began to embrace her Jewishness (“Comfortable Shoes”); after remaining closeted during her twenties and thirties, she eventually even accepted feminist (“Big Guts/Big Hearts”) and queer identities (“Victory Lap”). As arduous as these disparate but connected journeys were for Horvitz, she retells them with honesty, humor, and grace; and not to give away the ending, but yes, she does eventually get a good night’s sleep.

Reviewed by Keith John Glaeske