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The Year of Ice
by Brian Malloy
St. Martin's Press
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"But tonight I got to get laid. I put the key in the ignition. It starts with no problem and as I drive downtown, I tell myself that tonight's gonna be the night that I meet someone just like me. He's gonna be my age and tonight will be his first night in a gay bar too, and we'll see each other, and we'll leave right away and go to his place and have sex and talk about everything. He'll tell me how lonely he's been and I'll tell him how lonely I've been. He'll be my new best friend. I gotta be careful though so Tommy doesn't get wise. But Jesus, i gotta get laid. I gotta meet this guy whoever he is."

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Brian Malloy's debut novel The Year of Ice, set in Minnesota's Twin Cities in 1978, is compelled forward with this strong voice, of its narrator, Kevin Doyle-- a high school senior who's just coming out, dealing with the death of his mother, and pretty much an average sort of guy. Sure he's gay-- that much is clear to him from the way he feels when looking at some of the other boys at school-- but he isn't certain about much else. Even the gay part is a bit of a problem-- he never makes it into the bar that night-- because, well, he really is just a sort of regular guy.

Gay fiction has always been driven by the idea that its protagonist was special-- it's "a boy's own story" or "the best little boy in the world," or, in the case of Dennis Cooper's novels, "the worst possible boys in the world." And it makes perfect sense that a narrative about being "gay" would focus on being different, being singular, being outcast. On the other hand, the "alone" is never really "alone," and Malloy's tack here is to downplay Kevin Doyle's singularity and focus on his character's ordinariness, which, even in his acceptance of his sexuality, becomes even more salient a characteristic than being gay.

Part of this is because Kevin is just a high school kid from a working-class Irish family and has little connection to all of those tropes we've come to associate with the "gay life" that exists in "gay novels." He isn't artistic, he doesn't love opera, he doesn't even read books much. Basically he isn't really all that interesting, except for the fact that he's self-absorbed.

Nice Zeitgeist

Malloy has a great sense of time and place. It is 1978 and "M*A*S*H" is on TV, Pope Paul VI just died, Anita Bryant is starting her crusade in Dade County, and you can easily steal a copy of Playgirl from a convenience store if you pretend you're really buying Sports Illustrated. What Malloy also does in The Year of Ice is vividly to bring into our consciousness Kevin's internal life with the same attention to detail and nuance with which he describes that external world. Eschewing the emotional and psychological extravagance in which some gay coming-out novels revel, Malloy is a poet of the ordinary, even the mundane, and makes us see and care about the routine and the average character of everyday life.

Rummaging in the closet

The Year of Ice is also a book about hiding the truth and keeping secrets-- did Kevin's mother really commit suicide? Did she know about her husband's potential abandonment? Does anyone know about Kevin's queerness?-- and here is where the story inches to the obvious. But Malloy is a fine enough writer that he undercuts this inclination with deft irony: "Anytime I see a Halloween ghost I think of Mom. I hope she isn't watching me when I jerk off with my Playgirls or take a dump," claims Kevin, and it's hard not to agree that secrets are sometimes a good thing. Some of the secrets in The Year of Ice get exposed, some of them don't but Malloy understands that the thing about secrets is that they're often more interesting when unspoken, or even unexplored.

Perhaps the biggest secret in the novel is who Kevin really is. Certainly in the realm of the gay novel, the main theme is almost always that the protagonist discovers-- after he comes out-- that this is "who he really is." Well, life is more complex, and who someone "really is" is far more complicated then about "coming out," having sex with men, or even figuring out what one really wants. Kevin, for the most part, wants to get laid and not be lonely-- which is, in the end, what most of us want most of the time.

The Year of Ice is a terrific, moving, and vibrantly realized novel, that in the long run, is far more gay for its refusal to avoid the accepted clichés of gay fiction.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com