May Books: From Kansas to Texas

Scott Heim, Kansas’s greatest contribution to gay lit since Dorothy Gale, first made his mark in the literary scene with his debut novel Mysterious Skin (1995), a critical and commercial success and the basis for a movie by gay director Gregg Araki.

Heim followed this triumph with the less-successful In Awe (1997) before going on a ten year hiatus. Heim’s relative absence from the literary world makes his third novel, We Disappear (Harper Perennial; 320 pages; $13.95), long overdue and doubly welcome.

Though Heim has lived for some time in Boston (with his partner, the author Michael Lowenthal), he once again made his native rural Kansas the setting for his fiction, which is just as well since there are already far too many gay novels about New York or San Francisco. In fact, We Disappear is the most autobiographical of Heim’s works.

In a sense, We Disappear is a tribute to Heim’s late mother, Donna, who died in 2003 after a long battle with cancer. Like their real-life counterparts, the novel’s narrator is named Scott and his mother Donna; and like his creator, the fictional Scott returns to Kansas to care for his terminally-ill Mom. Both Scotts suffered from writers block as well as addiction to crystal meth, though happily the real-life Scott has been clean for some time.

Though she has her own health problems to worry about, Donna (the fictional one) is fascinated by the story of a local boy who was found dead in a Kansas field. Soon she begins a personal search for others like him: “disappeared” children who vanished for no apparent reason.

Behind this obsession is an event from Donna’s own childhood, for as a girl she too was kidnapped. Donna’s ordeal, though, had a happier ending with her eventual return, unharmed, by her captors. Though Scott at first dismisses his Mom’s recollections as the ravings of a dying woman, he soon becomes engrossed in her quest for missing children.

We Disappear has been falsely labeled, perhaps for commercial reasons, as a “mystery.” In fact, those who expect to read an old-fashioned whodunit, with an old-fashioned solution, will be greatly disappointed.

The heart of Heim’s narrative is not the missing kids, as interesting as their plight might be, but the personal hells suffered by Scott and his Mom. Theirs is a fascinating story, and their story is what makes We Disappear a fascinating read. Scott Heim promises to return to Kansas for his next novel, and we can’t wait to join him there.

Personal memoirs have come under a lot of scrutiny lately, after some of them were found to be less than 100% true. This is especially the case when the life in question seems too entertaining to be true, as is the case with The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux (St. Martin’s Press; 288 pages; $23.95).

Leleux himself even admits to having done some creative writing for the benefit of his narrative: “This is the story of my Texas life. And while (essentially) true to my experience, I must warn that it often reads better (as in funnier, or happier) than it was lived.” The result might not be kosher, but one imagines it makes for a much better book.