may 17.2002
BOOKS
B rown : T he
L ast D iscovery
of A merica
by Richard
Rodriguez■ Viking
Press, 2002;
$24.95 hard
bound.
Out on the shelves
Lurie’s style is always down to earth and
stoic, with no place for flights of floweriness.
She unsentimentally— though sometimes
humorously— charts the pain and joy of the
emotionally wary but hapless. Here, that style
is applied to real-life subjects who happened to
be possessed of more drama, quirks and eccen
tricities than most writers usually give their fic
tional creations.
The author hit it off with Merrill and his
“friend” at Amherst College in 1954. During
the 40 years that followed, she knew them
both as a couple and as writers. She notes that
both were independently wealthy and privi
leged (Merrill was the son of Charles Merrill,
founder of Merrill Lynch) but chose to live rel
atively modestly.
The couple also declined to join what Lurie
refers to as “the international set of rich,
famous homosexuals,” choosing instead to cul
tivate aesthetically like-minded friendships
without regard to class, gender or orientation.
(Thrill-seeking Truman Capote found the cou
ple “boring.”)
The relationship was burdened from both
an increasingly casual polyamory and inequali
ty in the fulfillment of literary ambition: Mer
rill is now venerated, but Jackson’s gift went
unacknowledged by publishers, critics and
audiences.
The two also dabbled in the supernatural—
hence the titular “spirits”— as
documented in Merrill’s master
piece, The Changing Light at San-
dover. However, what Lurie ini
tially saw as a bemusing experi
ment turned into years of eerie
obsession and isolation, during
which the couple seemed to pre
fer their supernatural friends to
the tangible ones.
The author makes it clear in
her foreword that she was not the
pair’s closest friend and that a
memoir— as opposed to biogra
phy— is highly selective, drawn
mainly from the limited resource
of human memory. But the story
springs from Lurie’s lucid mind in clean, ener
getic bursts. Her sharp recollections hit the read
er like so many poison darts: Absorbed quickly,
they linger in the consciousness until we feel
Merrill and Jackson’s (and Lurie’s) experiences—
the exhilaration and defeat— were our own.
— Christopher M cQuain JH
Richard Rodriguez discovers brown,
while Lesl6a Newman’s latest is black and white
cannot respond to this call,
cannot “choose a side.”
Nonetheless, the market
ichard
demands reconciliation. As a
Rodriguez
writer, he laments that his eth
writes poet
nicity— deemed “Hispanic" by
ically. He
the government, for which he
keeps his sen
thanks Richard Nixon with as
tences short and
much irony as sincerity—
sweet. Fragment
shelves his books in a special
ed. W hen he
category apart from the “white”
hits his rhythm,
(dubbed “universalist”) writers
the language
he admires.
becomes florid,
He notes that audiences
flowing, evoking
attending his readings consist
a passionate, at
.
. „ , .
. ,
Richard Rodriguez reads from Brown
mostly of Hispanic writers-in-
times erotic,
^
j 7 at Borders
training, while out in the hall,
imagery, a gush
7
young lesbians wait to hear the poet scheduled
o f emotion or an all-consuming idea— with
after him: “Why couldn’t I get the lesbians for
out drowning the reader. Faulkner edited hy
an hour? And the lesbian poet serenade my
Hemingway.
Mexican American audience? Wouldn’t that
T he simplicity of Rodriguez’s style serves a
he truer to the point of literature?”
complexity o f thought. Dispensing with the
Perhaps he might also lament this review,
usual postmodern jargon, he deconstructs the
appearing here because he is a “gay writer.”
ambiguities of U .S. racial relations and cul
Then again, maybe not. He attributes his fasci
tural politics hy targeting simplistic under
nation with the ambiguities of “brown" not
lying assumptions. Indeed, Americans have
only to his “mixed” ethnic heritage hut also to
oversimplified, telling the story as a conflict
his life as a gay Catholic. In either case, recon
of “black vs. white,” when, Rodriguez argues,
ciliation remains elusive, more so in the latter:
the United States has been “brown” from its
“My brown paradox: The church that taught
inception.
me to understand love...also tells me it is not
But, Rodriguez asks, what is brown? W hat
love I feel.”
kind of brown? Red brown, chocolate brown,
As a writer, Rodriguez wants to speak to his
mud brown? T he question goes to the heart of
gay audience; and to his Hispanic audience;
the country’s absolutist racial definitions: the
and to the lesbians in the hall; and to the
19th century “one-drop theory” that designat
straight guy writing this review. He wants to
ed an ostensibly “white" person “black”
speak to you, whoever you might he. And he
because of “mixed-race” parentage or the
wants you to listen.
black honors student accused hy
Rodriguez will read from
his peers of “acting white.” But
Brown: The Last Discovery o f
then, he probes, what is
America 7 p.m. May 17 at Bor
“white”? What is “black"?
ders, 708 S.W. Third Ave.
T he insistence on racial
— Kevin Moore
purity quickly becomes moral
istic, informing the ideologies
S he L oves M e ,
of right and left— the militias
S he L oves M e N ot
and segregationists hut also the
by Leslea Newman.
separatists and multicultural-
Alyson Books, 2002;
ists; both sides demand
$14.95 softcover.
“authenticity.” Rodriguez—
bom o f M exican and Native
rom Leslea Newman, the
American parents (or, as he
groundbreaking
author of
puts it, the conquistador and
H eather Has Two Mommies,
the Indian), raised a C atholic
comes a new collection of
yet living as a homosexual—
0 1 l6 S&1/6
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romantic fiction. She Loves M e, She Loves Me
N ot pretends to explore a wide diversity of
contemporary lesbian relationships. Eleven
stories deal with a supposed taboo, each spin
ning a denouement meant to keep us on our
toes.
In “Girls W ill Be Boys,” a young butch
mistaken for a man gets it on with a straight
woman; “Keeping Abreast” is about a
butch/femme couple shaken up by token
signs of breast cancer; in “Mothers of Inven
tion,” a butch reluctantly gets pregnant out
of love for her girl; “Flight of Fancy” show
cases a femme confused by her arousal for
(eek!) another femme; and in “A Ston e’s
Throw,” a butch is shocked by her attraction
to (gasp!) another butch.
Mirroring a stereotypical straight world,
the bulk of Newman’s couples encompass dis
tinctly separate gender roles; it’s a claustro
phobic construction of mainly butch/femme
lovers, who refer to one another as my
femme/my butch and reject butch/butch or
femme/femme action as unnatural and dan
gerously transgressive. Sister
hood is dead; femmes are repre
sented as universally catty and
competitive toward each other,
especially in the presence of
hutches.
She Loves M e succeeds in
bringing up an array of issues,
but it fails miserably at mirror
ing the queer heart. It is awk
wardly out of tune with a large
part of our community. Thus, if
you long for a text with room
for diversity and play, stick with
On Our Backs; if a sexy piece of
prefeminist era is your cup of
tea, this compilation will make
you swoon.
— Els Debbaut
F amiliar S pirits
by Alison Lurie.
Penguin USA, 2002;
$ 13 softcover.
K evin M oore is the Graphic Director at Just Out.
E ls DEBBAUT is assistant manager o f In Other
ovelist Alison Lurie’s Familiar Spirits is a
memoir of the revered 20th century queer
poet James Merrill and his partner of more
than four decades, the widely ignored writer
David Jackson.
N
Words Women's Books and Resources.
C hristopher M c Q uain is a Portland free-lance
reviewer.
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