Book Reviews: "By Nightfall" and "A Question of Manhood" Both Explore Straight Men with Dead Gay Brothers

I sometimes think that there's a fine line between a literary novel and a parody of a literary novel. Case-in-point is the new book by Michael Cunningham, a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Hours (and also the seminal work of gay fiction, A Home at the End of the World)  

By Nightfall (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $25) is about Peter, a 44-year-old straight art dealer who starts to question if everything about his life — his career, his marriage — is a lie. Searching for the passion that has long since left his marriage, he finds himself falling hopelessly in love with the irresponsible, sexually ambiguous 23-year-old brother of his wife.

It sounds like a parody, doesn't it? Let's face it: the characters in these novels are always insufferably neurotic, upper-crust New Yorkers who have jobs like "art dealer" that give them lots of opportunities to spend their days ruminating on exactly what "beauty" is. And what about that title — could it seem more pretentious and self-important?

And yet, Cunningham is such a terrific writer — and honestly, the prose here is shockingly good, by turns clever, funny, and insightful — that he ultimately makes this book pretty much a pleasure to read. And the book's central idea — that we're all just an impulsive whim away from making choices that would overturn everything in our lives — certainly resonates with what I know about human nature.

Basically, Cunningham really believes in this story, so ultimately I did too.

And rest assured, it is a story. This isn't one of those books where the main character questions everything, but doesn't really do anything. Or, I should say, it's one of those novels where small decisions and tiny actions end up having huge consequences.

I confess I'm a little wary of fiction by gay authors about straight men who suddenly fall in love with guys (even as they, and maybe even the work itself, somehow insist it's not "gay," that it's somehow something of a "higher" love). Of course, there's nothing wrong with wish-fulfillment or fantasy, except when it seems like fantasy. Cunningham straddled the line here, but didn't cross it, at least not while I was reading it.

This is a short novel, but a satisfying one, with two twists at the end that both caught me by surprise (one of which I totally should've seen coming, but didn't — the best kind of plot twist).

Early in the book, there's also a terrific flashback where we learn about Peter's charismatic, but dead older gay brother, and Peter's retrospective realization that he had something of a crush on him. The character, and Peter's shifting, difficult-to-define relationship to him, struck me as very complicated and very "real," like most of the things about this very readable novel.

Speaking of straight fictional characters with influential dead gay brothers, A Question of Manhood by Robin Reardon (Kensington Books, $15) tells the early 1970s story of a teenager, Paul, who has always lived in the shadow of his older brother Chris, the family's "golden boy" who has so taken their father's declarations to "be a man" to heart that he's joined the military to fight in the Vietnam War.

But while home on Thanksgiving leave, Chris trusts Paul with a tortured secret: he's gay. When the older brother is soon killed in action, Paul is left with this secret, and the growing realization that his father's traditional definition of manhood is extremely limited. But as the family moves on from the tragedy of Chris' death, his father hires a co-worker at the pet shop where he and Paul both work. Like Chris, JJ is gay (although out and proud), and once again his father, who doesn't know JJ is gay, clearly favors him over Paul. Paul is understandably resentful — so much so that he even contributes to JJ's harassment.

If Cunningham takes an artistic or "spiritual" approach to gay people, Reardon looks at it in a decidedly more straightforward, down-to-earth way. But just as the story of By Nightfall has been told before, so has the story of the jerky straight guy who has an encounter with a more enlightened gay person, helping him to realize that "manhood" is much more than just a question of brute strength and dominance.

At times, especially toward the end, A Question of Manhood is a little didactic: it's telling us its point, not showing us it through the actions of the characters. But what keeps A Question of Manhood from entering "very special episode" territory is both its earnestness and its subtly. Like Peter's dead gay brother in By Nightfall, Paul's gay co-worker is a terrifically realized gay character: recognizably gay (especially in 1972), but never seeming like a stereotype.

I think the appearance of both these novels, neither of which is "must-read" but both of which are worthwhile, is interesting, because they're telling gay-themed stories, but from the point-of-view of "straight" characters. Better still, both authors mix it up, blending gay and straight lives in ways that happen frequently in real life, but less frequently in gay fiction.

By Nightfall's Peter flirts with the boundary not between gay and straight, but between straight and bisexual. Meanwhile, A Question of Manhood's Paul is completely straight, but the only way he can show the courage to become a real man is by accepting a gay guy; you could even argue that, by befriending JJ, he actually becomes sort of spiritually blended with his dead gay brother, finishing a journey into manhood that Chris had started, but had been unable to finish due to his death.

The greater point is that gay and straight lives are becoming increasingly intertwined in gay fiction, just like in real life. And that's a very welcome thing.