An Octoberfest for Gay Books

Peter Cameron is best known as the author of serious literary fiction for adults including Andorra, The Weekend, and The City of Your Final Destination. That makes his latest novel, Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You, even more intriguing as it marks the celebrated author’s first venture into the young adult genre.

18 year-old James Sveck is a loner. His parents are divorced and coolly distant while his cynical older sister Gillian lives in a different sphere altogether. In fact, with few exceptions, James feels that he doesn’t connect with anyone. “I only feel myself when I am alone,” James admits to himself, a teenage sense of alienation likely to resonate with many gay readers.

The book follows James as he endures the final summer before he is supposed to go off to Brown University, something about which he is having second thoughts. When James tells his mother and father (independently) that he doesn’t want to go to college, the two of them send him to a therapist. They also ask him if he is gay, and though he never really responds to their question, his answer is evident by the end of the book.

Rather than judge his protagonist, Cameron presents James as a fascinating, complex young person with tremendous potential, as well as tremendous privileges. He lives in a very specific income bracket in Manhattan, enjoying freedoms many do not. However, in other ways, James is a typical teen stuck in his ironic, too-smart head.

Interestingly, we never know what James looks like. We know his interior landscape, but there are no descriptions of his hair or eye color, stature, or the even the timbre of his voice. A striking book jacket does show a dark-haired young man against a crisp, white background covering his face, and a bold, red type block-face for the title.

As for the title of the novel, it promises a certain kind of redemption that doesn’t necessarily mean a happy ending of the traditional sort, but something more along the lines of wisdom gained. It comes from a quote by Ovid that was also the motto of a sadistic sailing camp that James was sent to as a child. Nonetheless, the phrase perfectly expresses the way an understanding adult might talk to a teen in anguish.

Away by Amy Bloom (Random House) has received stellar reviews from every direction. The novel paints a fascinating, yet brief, picture of gay New York in the 1920’s. The protagonist, Lillian Leyb, a Russian immigrant woman whose family was cruelly murdered in a pogrom, works as a seamstress in a Yiddish theater in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She becomes the mistress of the handsome lead actor Meyer Burstein – mistress in a very loose sense, since Meyer is gay and it is, in fact, his father who has a sexual relationship with Lillian.

Meyer’s father is aware of his son’s homosexuality and in one memorable afternoon, makes sure his son knows how the gay demimonde of the time operates. He squires him to the Everard Baths and then to the appropriate bars where gay men can meet undisturbed. “Meyer’s father had given him a five-hour world tour of ‘Poofs on Parade’, without asking him a thing.” Not exactly the expected storyline for a gay son and his father at the time.

Since the narrative leaves Meyer and his father behind as Lillian, the main protagonist, travels to Siberia in search of her lost daughter, Away can’t properly be classified as a gay work of fiction. However, it may be of particular interest to gay readers because the scenes involving these secondary gay characters are compelling and unusual for a period novel such as this. And the book overall is certainly deserving of the critical praise it has received this year.