Fiction
A Fall in Denver
By Sarah Andrews. Scribner.
In the mystery genre, where the usual suspects, flatfoots, and set-pieces have been mixed and matched for more than a century, a reader (still) welcomes any chance to get away from the private eye's office with its bottle of Jim Beam aging in the filing cabinet. So perhaps it's not surprising that Sarah Andrews earned a fair amount of attention for "Tensleep," her first novel, which introduced sleuthing to the oil fields of wide-open Wyoming -- in the person of one Emily "Em" Hansen, geologist-in-training and mud slogger (which is a slim notch above roustabout). It was a case of "The Big Sleep" meets The Big Sky, and a charming combination.
In her new book, "A Fall in Denver," Andrews has shifted the scene, and promoted Em to a full-fledged geologist's job where the real oil business takes place -- at the home office in a slim glass-and-steel Denver skyscraper. It's late September, and quickly apparent that fall in this western city is no autumn in New York. There's a disturbing series of suspicious suicides, for one thing; oilmen in Em's building are crashing through the plate glass and falling thicker than aspen leaves on the sidewalks below. Is this just a mixture of despair and unoriginality, or a resurgence of that deliciously medieval murder method, defenestration?
The answer to that question is a very long time coming; Andrew's general pacing here gives you perhaps too much insight into the term geological time. It may take several million years to turn a forest into a puddle of light sweet crude, but it needn't have taken Andrews more than half this book before making it clear that murder has occurred, and the game is afoot. That slow drift into action, and the excessively detailed first-person narrative that accompanies it, make "A Fall in Denver" fairly laborious. Time for this self-professed cowgirl from Chungwater, Wyoming to light out for the territory. Home, Em, is where the suspense is.
-- Edward Neuert
Young Man From the Provinces:
A Gay Life Before Stonewall
By Alan Helms. Faber & Faber.
Alan Helms' frank and engaging new memoir, about his life among the "Silent Generation" of gay men in the 1950s and early 1960s, comes
garnished with three of the best jacket blurbs you're likely to see this year. Novelist Edmund White coos that the author was "the best piece of ass of my generation;" playwright Terrence McNally confesses that "Alan Helms was the young man I wanted to be;" and Gore Vidal calls Helms a "homme fatale" who "wittily and sharply reports what it is like to have so many Humberts and Aschenbachs on his case."
What this dream team is referring to is Helms' legendary fifteen-year reign as a "golden boyman" -- a beautiful and naive young midwesterner who quickly ascended to the highest social levels of New York's gay scene. Helms' "corn-fed good looks" (he was born in Indiana) and sculpted physique opened doors, and his book is largely a warm and dishy account of "glamour parties & opening nights & famous people & fabulous fucks." He recounts friendships -- and, often, affairs -- with Nureyev, Noel Coward, Anthony Perkins and Leonard Bernstein, and his writing often picks up a friendly, funny, funky glow. The copious sex, he writes, "came with the role of being a golden boyman. It was as if I'd auditioned for Hamlet and gotten the part, only to find that I had to fence."
Fencing and dishing aside, an alternative narrative percolates under the surface here. Helms relates his difficult childhood as "the worst thing an American boy can be -- a sissy," and details the insecurities (and conversely, the narcissism) that attended a life spent marinating in the reflected glow of the wealthy and famous. Helms, who now teaches literature at the University of Massachusetts, also rages at the pervasive homophobia of the era: among other things, he lost a possible Rhodes Scholarship because it was known he was gay.
"Young Man From the Provinces" isn't perfect. When Helms climbs into confessional mode he can sound awfully pop-psych, and his use of ampersands instead of the word "and" quickly cloys. But his book is ruthlessly honest and never less than captivating, and that's something.
