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The life course of a gay man born at the end of World War I is the subject of Yates’s latest novel, and it’s an interesting study of how a queer fellow of the Greatest Generation might have navigated the many turbulent events of twentieth century America, as well as family, friendships, and love.
Yates tells his subject Isaac Dahl’s biography in a first person narrative of twelve shortish chapters. Each chapter is a day (or so) in Isaac’s life, and an eight year increment forward in his tale. Beginning in 1926, when Isaac is eight years old, we meet his family, who are immigrants from Sweden, living in a hardscrabble mining town in Colorado. Most significantly, we’re introduced to Isaac’s twin sister Aggie and his best friend Bo. Whereas Isaac is mild-mannered and sensitive, Aggie is loud and undisguised in her opinions. The two bicker constantly, as siblings often do, but the tight bond between them is readily apparent. Affable, easygoing Bo becomes the perfect complement to their opposing personalities, not just as a peacemaker, but as someone who appreciates each of them for who they are. The three form an unbreakable triangle that gets them through a series of tragedies. Even as their journeys diverge at times, they always come back to each other.
The ‘strangeness’ of Isaac’s life, alluded to in the title, has to do with him encountering more than his fair share of freak natural disasters. At eight years old, he and Aggie survive an avalanche that has them tumbling together down a mountain in a steel bathtub that ultimately serves as a shelter from the tsunami of snow and debris, while their parents are lost along with most of their Colorado town. They’re taken in by an uncle in Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl, where they, and Bo, who was also orphaned by the avalanche, endure the nation’s worst heat wave and drought in history, which produces an epically devastating dust storm. Later, Isaac, a young war correspondent, gets assigned to the USS Houston in the Pacific theater of World War II. The battleship takes heavy bombing from the Japanese, and Isaac’s life is narrowly spared when he disembarks before the ship’s final, fateful foray in the Timor Sea.
Thus, one of the main themes of the novel is surviving against the odds, and that motif takes on new dimensions when Isaac joins his teenage nephew Elias (Aggie and Bo’s son) to volunteer as a peace activist during the racist backlash to desegregation in the 1960s South, and later, as he lives through the decades of the AIDS crisis.
Yates’s chronicle of all these harrowing events begs the question: what determines who survives and who does not? Yet, it would be foolish to offer some simplistic answer, and the author skirts around that pitfall. He does seem to have something to say about how one rebounds from the cruelties of the world, whether random or guided by the baser instincts of human nature, and that harkens back to the sturdy triumvirate of Isaac, Aggie and Bo. They stick together through each other’s personal hardships and life’s inevitable losses of loved ones, and develop a certain hardiness to whatever gets thrown their way, including the physical discontents of aging. In some ways it’s a three-way marriage, with Isaac taking on equal responsibility in raising his nieces and nephews, and later great-nieces and nephews, and showing them the world as they come of age.
One wishes that Isaac could have found love all on his own, but Yates’s handling of that matter scans genuine based on the position for gay men of Isaac’s generation. He finds occasional intimacies and a longer term partnership that is long distance and never really integrates the two men’s lives. That’s his personal choice, however, which reflects a solidly independent mindset, which one might expect of queer people who were not afforded acceptance of their relationships for the majority of their lives. Isaac’s story isn’t one of loneliness and regret for what could have been, however. The power of human relationships comes through for him in platonic ways, which are no less meaningful and comforting.
Reminiscent of John Irving’s quirky family sagas, Yates’s novel is a great title for readers interested in gay representation in twentieth century historical fiction.
Reviewed by Andrew J. Peters
Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews 