GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE January 30, 2009

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www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com

eveningsout

Three very different books are all engrossing reads

by Anthony Glassman

Sometimes things have very obvious connections. Oh, look! Three books about gay male Micronesian ditch diggers! What are the odds?

Other times, the common threads are not so easy to perceive.

With Drew Ferguson's The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second, Rebecca Brown's The End of Youth and Kim Powers' Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story, there are two things that can tie these yarns together: Excellence of writing, and children. That second bond is the tenuous one. Brown's The End of Youth (City Lights, $11.95, paper) is a collection of 13 short pieces, all loosely connected, and it's never really clear whether they're true or not. They certainly could be, or Brown could just be that damn good a writer.

drew ferguson

The Screwed Up Life of

Charlie the Second

Being a nerd is way underrated...

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Ferguson's The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second (Kensington, $15, trade paper) follows Charles James Stewart, Jr., a gangly gay nerd with ears like radar dishes searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, as he falls in love in for the first time.

Where, then, does Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story (Carroll & Graf, $15, trade paper) fit into this picture? Powers tells of Capote's declining years, as he gave in to the physical and mental toll of his excesses, and the barely-reignited spark of his friendship with Harper Lee. When they were in Kansas do-

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the end

youth

REBECCA BROWN

ing research on In Cold Blood, the murder case involved child victims, but that's a stretch from the other two books' dealings with formative years.

Perhaps if the books are examined a little more closely.

Brown's work has a confessional feel to it, the definite first-person eye, talking first about how she was born with a crooked eye that was eventually fixed through training, forcing the eye into its proper position.

That's a lie; her first story in the collection discusses her recent thoughts on heaven, but then end coming at the beginning is too counter-intuitive.

She talks about camp, about her grandmother, about "three on a match." All of these disparate stories have their common theme of youth, and the Library of Congress information at the beginning places them clearly in the realm of fiction, but one must wonder, how much of Brown's own childhood is in these pages?

Charlie the Second, on the other hand, is clearly fiction, and relatively lighthearted. The eponymous character goes through his share of drama, but it's high school, does-he-love-me-ornot, why-is-he-so-mean drama.

Charlie never dreams he'll really find love, until the new kid in school starts pay-

ing attention to him. He's on the soccer team with Charlie, but he's so self-assured, so handsome, that our young protagonist cannot believe that they could connect so intimately.

First love, however, seldom runs true, and the fragile relationship crumbles, leaving our big-eared hero to pick up the pieces.

Powers' novel, meanwhile, treads on almost hallowed ground-the creation of In Cold Blood and the relationship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote. The author takes hard, biographical facts the two authors' childhood friendship, their reuniting years later to research In Cold Blood-and sets it in retrospect, will Lee revisiting the events in her mind as she and Capote are both haunted by various members of the Clutter clan, the family whose murder forms the basis for Capote's novel.

Powers freely admits the liberties he takes with "the truth," since his work is not intended to be non-fiction. Rather, it is an intriguing, engrossing novel, based on fact.

So, we have a tenuous link tying the three together-children-and a more solid connection: they're just darn good books. Take either, or both. Just read the books.

CAPOTE IN KANSAS

Kim Powers

Mesnard Painting and Faux Finish

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