What's the Humor in Desperation? A Review of Greg Kearney's The Desperates by Raphael Klarfeld, M. D.

An assumption I have is that the author, a known humorist and columnist, decided to write a novel and said to himself, "I have always been told I should write about what I know the most about from my own life." Did Greg Kearney say this to himself as he embarked on this particular novel? I have to wonder, because this is a story about, well, "losers". What can be funny about their grim trajectory as they are sitting on the launchpad of life? I would put this tale into the category of a tragicomedy. One thing that amazed me as I began to read it, was that, despite the obvious collision course toward which Joel Price and all of these characters were accelerating at beyond the speed of light, I found myself laughing at them. Consider the tragedy of twenty-year-old Joel's inability to hold down for more than a day his job as a gay phone-sex worker even though he was being trained by the "office phone-sex royalty", Bernie. Now Joel is representative of the competence and the ambition of most of the characters in this calamitous opus. What do you do when you are average to a little above average in school but find no particular subject that you excel at? You don't like school much, because you are effeminate enough to be obviously queer and bullied virtually daily, and your mother thinks she is supportive by doing things like maybe spitting chewing gum in the hair of the mother of the boy who is bullying you. Now, in addition, neither Joel nor Teresa, his mother, could see how destructive and tragic the outcome of their behaviors might potentially be. Can you see the humor in the scenario yet?

The other side of what I felt as I read was that I could see the horrors that lay ahead for these characters as well as the many other "losers" to come. So, enter the tragic side of the literary formula as well some guilt at laughing at them.  Edmund and Binnie, the next characters to be introduced, were equally lame, and I mean that quite literally as physically and / or mentally disabled. Joel met Edmund, a fortyish client, through a phone encounter on the sex line and considered him husband material, inviting himself over and leaving his job because of the perceived lack of need for it there being a "winner" in the sights. Edmund had HIV and had lost most of his friends to the disease while he, himself, had been wrested from the claws of death by the new cocktail available. Edmund fed off Joel's youth until he came upon hustler, Binnie, who was both young and additionally, "butch". Through Binnie Edmund was introduced to a whole new lifestyle that was absolutely vibrant, invigorating and erotically the ultimate along with party drug, Tina. How could Edmund turn down life with Binnie? Of course, finding himself so in love with Binnie, he was even thinking through all of the ways he could help Binnie and make Binnie's life better with a little financial support?

Since the phone sex job did not work out and the relationship to Edmund was lost to Binnie, Teresa took it upon herself to find Joel a job with a sixtyish gay closeted museum curator who had a vast collection of these unusual apparel accessories commonly known as buttons. Donald needed a young man to help him sort and organize this vast collection of buttons as well as his somewhat disorganized and foreign emotional world. This began to look like it might be working when the storyline began to center on Teresa's suddenly rapidly advancing cancer of the lung which had metastasized to various places in her body, liver, brain, etc.

As the novel was beginning to fully flesh out the consequences of the choices and unfolding of the relationships of this entire group of unfortunate characters, it became clear that the relatively remote character, Hugh, Joel's father, would soon be wifeless, ergo rudderless. This dilemma, interestingly, presented an entirely new set of problems and ironic solutions that did fall upon Joel to address. As I bring this review to a close, I hope that I have been able to open a window into the disarray, derangement and chaos that Greg Kearney keenly observed in order to write the clever tragicomedy that is The Desperates. He does bring home the humor in the life of the uncommonly common man.

Inside a Pearl by Edmund White

                                              A Review by Raphie Klarfeld, M.D.

Inside a Pearl is a book of White's memoirs about his approximately sixteen years in Paris. His interest in Paris began when he met Marie Claude de Brunhoff in 1975 at a party in New York. His description of her is of a grande dame with a polish and elegance that drew him to her magnetically. She was the wife of the creator of the Babar the Elephant children's books who lived in Paris. He  later traveled with a new lover, John Purcell, twenty years his junior and a student at Parson's, to Paris where his friendship with MC grew. He knew very little French and developed a strong curiosity about French language and culture. It took about one and one-half years at Alliance Francaise to begin to understand what much of the conversation going on around him was about.

As he began to understand he learned that, contrary to his belief that the French were predominantly left politically, that many were far to the right and even monarchists. Mitterand was the first leftist president in half a century. It became clear that he could curry favor by praising France as the cultural center of the world, a beacon of freedom and global fashion headquarters. He discovered the French interrupted each other constantly during conversation; writers of fiction in America were seen as not being intellectuals whereas French writers were; and one in six Frenchman lived in Paris. The French frequently socialized during the week whereas Americans worked late, went directly home and, exhausted from work, went to bed early. Paris was full of book stores which had become rare in the U.S. The French also did not like the smell of cooking food in the same place they were eating. His experiences with learning French were to me personally reminiscent of the four and one-half years I spent in Germany. I was eighteen when I first arrived and attended the Goethe Institute in a very intensive language learning experience and was fluent at about nine months, but before that I felt the same sense of isolation that White described. He recalled a situation in which he was to interview an author for television. He had rehearsed the questions he would ask but could not understand the finer points of what the author was saying and would just have to move on with the next question.

The rest of the book had to do primarily with the different people he met while he was there. Michel Foucault was a powerful figure regarding social philosophical ideas but did not like to discuss those ideas during a social evening. Foucault's English seemed to be self-taught also and spoken with a strong accent. He could be combative defending his ideas and seemed to not want to poison his social evening with intense philosophical discussion. Other people included the playwright Jean-Marie Besset, Peggy Guggenheim, Salman Rushdie, author Benjamin Moser, composer and Pulitzer Prize winner Ned Rorem, author John Hawkes, biographer  of Giacometti and Picasso, James Lord who also wrote My Queer War, courtier Azzedine Alaia (White wrote about him in Vanity Fair), movie diva Maria Felix, and many others. Many of the people listed were minor figures that I did have to search out on the internet.

The time in France ended with the meeting of his current partner of many years Michael Carroll who was living in Pilsen Czechoslovakia, home of pilsner beer. He was 25 years White's junior and was teaching English there serving with the Peace Corps. It was at that point that White was offered a professorship at Princeton which he accepted, and they both moved to Princeton and later after receiving tenure moving to New York. He found developing friendships in the U.S. difficult as compared to New York because people did not tend to venture out during the week. He praised Joyce Carol Oates for her efforts in helping him meet people at Princeton. He felt after 16 years in Paris out of step with Americans. As I mentioned earlier this is something I could also relate to after my sojourn in Germany.

I found the book most interesting and certainly well-written. His vocabulary is vast and I was glad I was reading on a Kindle so that I could frequently and easily look up words. I would recommend it to anyone as a good book but, particularly, to those familiar with White's work.

Secrets, Taboo Oedipal Death Wishes, and The Unspoken Good, Bad and Ugly of Intimate Male Relationships: A Book Review by Raphael Klarfeld, M.D. of Local Souls by Allan Gurganus

Allan Gurganus’ true gift as an author is his deep psychological portraits of the denizens of the small town of Falls, North Carolina, known as “the Fallen” by those same locals. This volume of three novellas, Fear Not, Saints Have Mothers, and Decoy is filled with the juicy “dirt” that is dished out as what some might call idle gossip, but which is in fact the poison that is quite possibly in the drinking water. The name of the river that flows through Falls is Lithium River. We are left to wonder if this river is indeed laced with the well-known treatment for bipolar disorder which is toxic ingested in large quantities. The name left me with a bit of a chill.

Fear Not is about secrets, as in secret enmity, most probably unconscious since the deeds associated with the secret are too horrific to have been done consciously. How could a man decapitate his best friend, (intentionally?), and then impregnate the same friend’s daughter posthumously? What forces could have been operating in the mind of Dr. Dennis S. to have done such things? Such things are never questioned openly among “the Fallen”. The possible motivations of what has happened are buried as secrets as deeply as the system will allow and then everyone tries to “move on” with little resolved about what was really at work in the sleepy innocence of that small community.

In Saints Have Mothers, the focus is on the sweet innocence of a daughter who would let her mother believe she had died in Africa on a summer school internship trying to swim across a river. At least we know that "African authorities" called her mother and reported her death. Somehow Caitlin’s phone is malfunctioning so that she is not receiving her mother’s desperate calls about her own reported death. She needed only to avail herself of a friend’s phone, and one simple phone call would have cleared up the misunderstanding. Then again Mom could have reached Saint Caitlin perhaps by other means. Instead she arranges the funeral of her daughter very publicly in detail to the point of having a local band instructor write a chorale in C Major for Caitlin and even paying a hefty retainer to a local symphony to perform it. She uses the money she had been saving for her daughter’s education. The funeral becomes a Cecil B. DeMill production. When her daughter walks through the door on the day she is due back from Africa, the community oozes adoration and relief while Mom seems to ooze quiet hidden rage seated in her oedipal competitive strivings. Everyone, family and friends, would they not perceive the conflict between mother and daughter, the obvious tension when Mom gives her daughter a black eye “accidentally”?

Some people wise up and manage to escape Falls when they get to college. The ending of Saints Have Mothers for the psychologically minded is no surprise. Interestingly, no apologies are ever sincerely given, and each as they feel offended rather than introspectively looking at their own part in the conflict simply expects an apology from the other.

Actually of all three novellas, Decoy contains the most of “examined lives” as two men live out their competitive strivings. “Doc” lives his life as the perfect country general practitioner in this small town, except he is Yale educated and could have moved on to an exotic specialty and some fashionable practice in a more upscale community environment. So what are his motivations in coming back to Falls? Being a big fish in a small pond?

When he finishes his practice of some 40 years at age 70, he then proceeds to produce hand carved duck decoys that are down to the feathering absolutely perfect, things of such perfection that they are museum quality pieces that sell for astronomical prices which puts him way out of the league of his good friend, Red’s son, Billy who laments at his own limitations and underlying envy of Doc Roper. In the end the flood carries away Doc’s treasures after he is really too old to continue these quality productions. Red's Billy gets some pleasure out of the destruction of these treasures of his close friend and he seems to have some awareness of these feelings also. They both seem to know how they feel about each other even though it is not spoken between them.

Falls is such a small town, but the psychology of its residents is as deep as the river was when it flooded that town. Allan Gurganus’ portraits of its residents are eerie and dark. Their mystery makes them also alluring.  Local Souls is an excellent trilogy well worth the read.

Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality 

by Ted Olson and David Boies

a Review by Raphael Klarfeld, M.D.

I was initially very excited to be reading this historical work by two famous attorneys, unlikely bedfellows, having represented opposite sides in the argument in the Supreme Court  about the Florida vote count in the Bush Gore Campaign. I anticipated some really excellent writing and some enlightenment as to how these two men came together to fight Prop 8. I did gain some insight perhaps about why Ted Olson took up what has been a left wing fight. I think it was two things: The first was stated which was that he believed that Proposition 8 violated the United States Constitution. The second was not overtly stated and the motivation appears to me to have been self-adulation and the desire for fame.

I will comment first on the writing of the book. It was an account, a blow by blow description of the series of events from the time of passage of Prop 8 forward. As I read it, it did hold my attention, and it did contain some accounts of the emotions of the plaintiffs and some of the emotions of the attorneys. It seemed unrealistically positive. I would think in trials where this much is at stake, that there would be some areas where the two attorneys who agreed to do this might be at odds about how matters should be handled. It seemed to me that both attorneys were extraordinarily careful to point out each others skills and best legal specialties. There was little or no disagreement between them and their work with each other went on so seamlessly throughout the trials that it made it difficult to believe and, frankly, uninteresting. One is a hard right wing conservative, the other a liberal and they managed this whole pro bono series of legal battles without arguments, faux pas, or glitches. It is just not very believable and kind of boring. It just seems like maybe some things were unsaid.

The other detail that made this book seem "self-reverential" as one Amazon reviewer put it, is that there was so much history of other people who were a part of this fight and had brought it to the point that these lawyers could proceed with their work. None of that history was mentioned in the book. Nobody else got any of the credit except Olson and Boies. First of all, there was the passage of Proposition 22 passed in 2000 making marriage between a man and a woman. There was the fight in the California Supreme Court finally striking it down as unconstitutional after a long battle in 2008. There was, for example, the fight led by assemblyman Mark Leno who managed to get AB 839 passed in 2005 making marriage between two people that Governor Schwarzennegger then vetoed. He got it passed again in 2007 and the governor vetoed it again. The roles played by other organizations involved were hardly mentioned if at all. How about Gavin Newsom's efforts in 2004 in San francisco to issue marriage licenses?

I may be unduly suspicious, and things may have been just as they were painted throughout Redeeming the Dream. If so, the story was not that interesting. The things that were the most interesting were all of the things discovered about the tactics of the Mormon and Catholic Churches. Many of those things probably could not be admitted into evidence. Maybe that is why they did not make it into the book. After all was said and done, the Supreme Court decision changed nothing except in California, and it was not because of the skill of these two attorneys. It was because the other side did not have standing. 

Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic by Alison Bechdel

Review by Raphael Klarfeld, M.D.

I find myself in a peculiar position reviewing this truly excellent piece of artwork by Alison Bechdel, because I am a Freudian psychoanalyst by training and survived what her father went through. Ms. Bechdel spent seven years of her life crafting this autobiographical comic book which is both an excellent piece of artwork and an excellent piece of writing. The main reason I say this is because in 231 pages Ms. Bechdel says what it would take many people several years in daily psychoanalysis to say and, in addition, the psychoanalysts were the last to recognize the immutability of homosexuality and the harm that reenforcement of internal homophobia does.

This comic book illustrates these facts so beautifully as Alison describes her gay father and the life he led in the closet which culminated in his suicide at a young age. I, myself lived his tragedy for nineteen years in a heterosexual marriage which also produced a lesbian daughter whom I love dearly. As a psychoanalyst I came out the second time when information began to appear in the psychoanalytic literature to the effect that the causes were hard wiring probably related to hormone levels the fetus was exposed to during the second trimester of gestation when mating behavior is being formed in the fetal brain. I came out the first time at age eighteen in college when I fell in love with my fraternity brother and we moved to Berlin, Germany so we could live together. When I came back to the States I married a woman I had known a large part of my life and went into analysis. I suffered bouts of depression until I began to understand that I was made this way and could live a happy productive life as a gay man. I saw myself clearly in Ms. Bechdel's portrait of her father, an intellectualizing, project-oriented, physician /psychiatrist / psychoanalyst with an interest in interior design, literature, art and architecture. I almost became a professor of Germanistik, the study of German life and culture through its art, literature and history. The similarities to Alison's father are amazing.

As for her portrayal of herself in the novel, clearly, she is aware of the awareness she had of her father's veneer as he pursued his gay interests with a relationship of sorts with an adolescent neighborhood boy who was yard boy and baby-sitter. It angered her to watch his inauthenticity and obfuscation as she pursued her own identity with vigor. The pictures of her smoldering smirk and looks of disbelief are so perfect as images of her struggle.The sequence of events in the book are not entirely chronological which is also so true to life. One part of a story in your life may come to mind later as you negotiate other passages. Her goal though was definitely to find out who she was. Dad seemed to unconsciously be trying to help her realize it and hide it through intellectualization at the same time just as he had.

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel artfully weaves her life story of identity as a lesbian woman in "graphic" authenticity and detail. If you look closely at the comics you will see great  detail, such as the names of books written on their spines as they were when she read them. She demonstrates remarkable talent as a novelist and graphic artist. I would recommend this book to anyone, gay or straight. It was after all a best-seller.

Kamikaze Boys - James Bell, a Book Review by Raphie Klarfeld, MD

Kamikaze Boys - James Bell

by Raphie Klarfeld, MD

This is a young adult novel about two guys who are outcasts in a middle America high school. They fall in love and run the school social gauntlet. I won't spoil the end by telling whether they survive it or not. It is also a study in how opposites attract.

David is a shy, introverted, gay junior who is doing his best daily to avoid the bullying by his nemesis, Chuck, whose primary daily goal  is to make life for David as miserable as possible. Connor is a senior who is a brawn over brains kind of guy, who also has a reputation for having been in "juvie" and a scar on his neck about which rumors abound. Most of the gossip has to do with some sort of brawling knife fight. For initially unknown reasons, Connor chooses to protect David from Chuck by intimidating Chuck and giving David rides home from school daily. David begins to live his life trying to stay close to Connor to avoid getting beat up. 

As the story evolves, it comes out that Connor is gay and has a crush on David. David has been smitten from the beginning by Connor's rugged good looks and awesome physical, alpha male social status at the school. David can not believe his good fortune that Connor is gay and is sweet on him, nor can anyone else at school for that matter. That has benefits for both. It smashes one stereotype as one by one characters in the story realize that he is. 

So on the one hand, we have the stereotypical, slightly effeminate, gay kid, David, who is shy and introverted with a nerdy home-schooled best friend. He is bullied throughout his childhood. On the other hand, there is Connor, the macho, relatively extroverted, self-confident, gang member type kid from the other side of the tracks. There are other characteristics that would seem to make them uncommon bedfellows. David's father is a "Type A personality" who pushes David constantly to keep his grades up to go to college. David is intelligent and maintains an A average but is very put off by his Dad's badgering often threatening to not go to college which of course results in more badgering. David's mother fell in love with another man and left David's Dad because of these rigid ways. Connor, on the other hand, has mediocre grades, works at a McDonald's slinging burgers after school in an effort to save for the deposit on an apartment to escape life at home with a drug abusing father on disability who sits in his chair watching television all day. He also has a younger brother, Tommy, who he also takes up for and protects. His mother is loving, and he does have her care and comfort for support but still, of course, wants to be his own man.

The novel is, therefore, a study in how two very different types, virtually opposites fall in love and take on an antagonistic world. James Bell does a masterful job at showing how the rocks in the head of one fit the holes in the head of the other. He also does a masterful job at developing all of the characters, but primarily David and Connor. He is able to demonstrate that they can emotionally develop to fill the cerebral holes and turn some of the rocks to cranial gemstones as they grow in this novel. That is the most beautiful part of the story.

I loved the book. I would recommend it to anyone, gay or straight. I would recommend it  strongly to gay young adults. The sexual content is pretty steamy and is probably more than most young adults are exposed to, but that has an educational benefit as well.

Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre

A Review by Raphael Klarfeld, MD

It is easy to see why this novel won a Lambda Literary Award at first glance because of the beautiful prose. For example, "But the wind moved across the surface of Lake Nyos. Like a tablecloth that one pushes across a tabletop, which gathers momentum and falls of its own weight to the floor, the warm water collected in one corner, then slipped down the side, past the strata of frigid water, to the depths where something lay sleeping. The villagers, who regarded Lake Nyos alternately as a benevolent mother and a sanctuary for evil spirits, would later say it was the Lake Witch." There are many beautiful descriptions such as this one.

On the other hand, one can also see why it should not have won an award. I was not sure of this until after my second reading of the novel and comments from book club members that it is not an easy novel to follow. It is actually a series of stories about different people in a small town, namely, Eula, Idaho a few hours drive from Boise. This could just as well be a book of short stories were it not for the fact that these different people and there different stories are intertwined and take place over a specific time frame that interlocks them. This makes for a novel with a lot of characters to keep up with which might have  been manageable. However, Mr. McIntyre chose to develop chapters that did not hang together and were broken up by often unrelated stories and characters in the same chapter. It caused the reader to have to suddenly shift gears and try to remember a new set of characters in the middle of the chapter. This produced an awkward flow and choppiness that would cause many readers to lose interest.

The content was intriguing. The main storyline was a high school science fair competition. The two main characters were gay teens growing up in an unenlightened, bullying midwest environment. One of them had the additional handicap of autism. The subject they chose for their project was a lake in Africa around which the villagers and cattle mysteriously died in the middle of the night. Their hypothesis was that a gas had been expelled from the lake raising the question, "Could this happen in the lake close the their own small town community?" Enrique was the planner and executor of the project, and his autistic counterpart Gene was the brains behind the planning but unable to accomplish anything involving interpersonal relations. The hidden force that killed this African community was a metaphor for the hidden forces of evil (convenient fundamentalism, primarily) in the Eula community.

The metaphorical playing out of this concept was well done, and the characters were well-developed as their roles in this concept played themselves out. If the reader was able to stick with the awkwardness of the plot organization then that reader was in the end greatly rewarded. Overall, it is a book I would recommend to those I thought were willing to stick out these difficulties with plot configuration.  I would give it three out of five stars.