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.