GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

NOVEMBER 12, 1993

BOOKS

Bare substance robs characters of personality

The Listener

by Bo Huston

St. Martin's Press, $17.95

Reviewed by Matthew Lerch

Escape, from the law or your past or yourself, is the common thread throughout Bo Huston's collection of stories, The Listener.

In the title novella, two characters undergo crises of identity in a lonely town on the California coast.

Paul is a beleaguered photographer come to stay in a friend's cabin for a month's respite from his stagnant career and the mounting death toll of his social circle. Layer upon layer of affectation and conceit is stripped away during his visit, leaving him to wonder if the original man still exists underneath it all.

The town eccentric, Jane, is a mother who suffers paranoia and subjects her son to ritualized abuse. She undergoes a rebirth of spirit after a chance encounter with a man recently released from a psychiatric hospital. In other stories, a man accused of improp-

er conduct with a young boy adopts a nomadic life of endless highway as his refuge; a new teacher moves from New York to teach third grade in a desert community, and tragedy follows; a dying man returns to his childhood home for a final visit with his mother. Ideas and intellectual machinations loom much larger than personalities in Huston's stories.

Individual characters are usually confined to one name, a few discernible traits, and unknowable histories.

Most characters move forward through circumstances with the occasional emotional outburst, but even that seems random and inconsequential.

..In the case of Jane, the transformation from near-psychotic to spiritual vessel seems curious, but fails to change the essential air of the story. She was unexplained before, she remains so following the change.

Huston gives his characters only the barest of substance, and this robs them of personality and empathy. Anything is possible for these anonymous people. There, again, nothing is just likely to happen, as well.

That's only $10 a foot!

The first annual Rootin' Tootin' Boot Scootin' Line Dance Workshop Weekend is all set for the weekend of November 12-14.

Sponsored by the Rainbow Wranglers and the Cleveland City Country Dancers, this fun event will give you a chance to do lots of lesbian and gay Country & Western dancing, and learn the latest line dances from an instructor.

famous Boot Scootin' Ball on Saturday night; a Sunday morning brunch at Ohio City Oasis; then more dancing all Sunday afternoon and evening.

Dancers from all over are scheduled to attend, including members of Cactus Club (Manhattan), Bub City (Chicago), Lone Rider (Toronto), and Tradewinds (Columbus). Housing is available for out-oftowners. The cost is just $20 for the whole weekend. But you must RSVP! Call Bill at

There's a whole weekend of activities planned including a Friday night dance; multiple Saturday workshops all after-221-7544, Ted at 651-4664, or Gerry at noon at Archwood UCC; the soon-to-be-

671-0717.

Welcome to the Holidays

a concert by the North Coast Men's Chorus

Timothy Robson, Music Director

The AIDS epidemic and gay sexuality appear to some degree in each story, which seems somewhat fantastic. It's difficult to imagine such full-blooded activities as sexual desiring or contracting a disease in this world of one-dimensional souls.

A sense of time is treated loosely on many occasions in the book, resulting in slight confusion as to setting. Perhaps this is intentional, but it is put forth so casually to seem more accident that purposeful. Too often, auxiliary characters are treated with contempt by the author.

The Listener is being published posthumously. Whether these stories were Huston's first attempts at fiction or mature prose is not indicated. The concepts explored in these stories are challenging and complex. With time, the other aspects of storytelling may have been equally developed.

Bo Huston, a native of Cleveland and a resident of San Francisco, was 33 when he died earlier this year from complications due to AIDS. His previous works include The Dream Life, Horse and Other Stories and Remember Me.

RICK GERHARTER Bo Huston, author of The Listener

Tender prose makes you want to hug them

Martin and John, a novel

by Dale Peck

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 p., $21.00, hardcover

Reviewed by Timothy Robson

This first novel by twenty-five-year-old Dale Peck is highly auspicious. The story concerns John, a young man who runs away from an abusive home life to become a hustler in New York, where he meets and

through his life or what his life might have been in these imaginary concoctions. It is as if one is looking through a kaleidoscope; with the turn of each page the pieces of the story take on new but related colors Doand aspects. bilioni Ástus25 votouded on

The brilliance of the novel's structure is carried by the honest, direct, yet surprisingly

falls in love with Martin, who promptly The brilliance of the novel's

becomes ill with AIDS. They return to John's home in Kansas, where during Martin's

structure is carried by the

final illness John writes a diary telling of honest, direct, yet

their day-to-day existence.

Interspersed with the "real" story are other episodes involving "Martin”. and "John." It is not until well into the book that one realizes that each of these episodes is a story written by John, each of them with characters named Martin and John. There are recurring themes through the stories, but characters of the same name play vastly different roles in each. In one Martin is a young drifter taken in by John's family; in another Martin is the unattainably debonair man at a sophisticated cocktail party, who for reasons unstated takes up with the very ordinary John; in yet another Martin and John have hot sex. It is as if John is working

surprisingly tender prose.

tender prose. We want to reach out and give these boys a hug and say, "It's okay, you're going to be okay." This "gentleness" seems even to have been carried over by the book's designer. The volume is smaller than a typical trade novel, but larger than a mass market paperback-slim and small enough almost to fit in the palm of the hand, with a dust jacket of cool, burnished pastel yellow stock. Like a prayer book, it is pleasing to hold and even more pleasing to read.

FAST:

COME OUT FOR THE HOLIDAYS! ...as the bright and gay sounds of the chorus revisit the splendor of the holiday season

Saturday, December 11th, 8:00 p.m.

Euclid Avenue Congregational Church of the United Church of Christ 9606 Euclid Avenue, corner of E. 96th and Euclid (near the Cleveland Clinic)

Tickets: $10 in advance, $12 at the door

Available from any chorus member or through Advantix (241-6000)

Delivery $10 Cuyahoga, Summit, Portage Co

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