24 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE JUNE 6, 1997

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BOOKS

A fresh, honest love story

from an author to watch

Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

St. Martin's Press, $21.95 hardcover

Reviewed by Kaizaad Kotwal

Since the end of the Cold War, it seems as if there is a frantic search underway to find a new enemy. The last six years or so have shown that, more often than not, that the enemy is manifested in the guise of the foreigner, the immigrant, or the alien.

Timothy Murphy

smarminess and identity struggles that have begun to tarnish the while picket fences of suburbia, a place that playwright and performance artist Eric Bogosian has called "a tar pit of stupidity."

While most high-school teenagers worry about figuring out why Latin Americans don't speak Latin (à la Dan Quayle), Brooks and Erik have to figure out how to love in a world where their languages of race and sexuality have always been censored, and where their professing of love for one another is seen as an act of perversion and abomination.

JEFFREY GOLICK

In suburbs across the United States, the battle is being fought to keep neighborhoods clear of immigrant "riff-raff." Protecting these geographic safe-havens is an alienating network of highways, home security systems, and fenced-in yards.

It is this very geography against which Timothy Murphy sets his debut novel Getting Off Clean. One of the main characters is black, the other white. One is a young man from a working-class family, struggling to make it into an Ivy League school from a public high school while his family struggles with an out-of-wedlock pregnant daughter, and another child with Down's syndrome. The other young man is preppy, impeccably dressed at all times, and comes from old wealth which allows him to attend a boarding school.

While most readers will be loathe to admit that they placed the preppy one as white and the working-class guy with the pregnant sister as black, it is this same battle of (mis)perceptions that Murphy forces his characters and hence his readers to confront. And race is not their only cross to bear. Eric Fitzpatrick and Brooks Francis Tremont are gay.

Getting Off Clean is a tender coming-ofage story, intimate and sweetly defined, painted on a grand backdrop of the bigotry,

Murphy's novel is fresh, fastpaced and always rich in character development and poignant storytelling. It's a story that revels equally in the growing pains of being young, gay, and in love, as well as the pure joy of that first love and lust all comingled into innocent yet ravishing sex.

The story is relevant to gay youth as well as those living in the mythology of the suburbs as being epitomes of perfection and the ultimate desirability in the acquisition of the American dream. Murphy tells a story that confronts all sides, gay and straight, white and black, male and female about their perceptions of and attitudes towards the "other." But he doesn't do this in a way that is preachy or a covert manifesto of political correctness. Instead, all the creatures in Murphy's world are flawed, and they must negotiate understandings with each other through a slow and often painful process of conflict, love and betrayal.

Murphy's novel is in many respects reminiscent of the recent British film Beautiful Th The difference is that as soon as Getting Off Clean allows the reader to be sucked into its sentimentality, Murphy jolts us back into the reality of a love that may never be. There is no clean and necessarily happy tying up of loose ends in the novel, because life is simply not that way. Certain scenes in the book seem soap-operatic and over the top, yet Murphy manages to keep the suspension of disbelief under control.

Murphy is a new author to keep an eye out for. His first book is a fresh and honest piece of storytelling, in which it is hard not to fall in love with the characters. At the end of the book, it is hard not to cheer the two youngsters on to a life of joy and fulfillment together. But the novel reinforces to us that, in this world of racial turmoil and forbidden loves, getting off clean is a Herculean task.

Quite the opposite is true of Murphy. This is a mostly polished and remarkable debut novel and as an up-and-coming author, Murphy has certainly gotten off clean from the starting block towards a good literary career ahead.

Harmony in Food, Drink, Art & Entertainment

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SATURDAYS!!

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JUNE EVENTS

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