Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Kevin Killian has long been considered one of the great-- if unknown-- contemporary gay writers. His earliest published works-- Shy and Bedrooms Have Windows-- were beautifully wrought, finely tuned exercises in autobiographical fiction, even though the first was labeled a "novel" and the second a "memoir."

Over the past decade, Killian fans have had to make do with short pieces appearing in anthologies. A short item in Wrestling With the Angel appearing two years ago and a new erotic memoir in the recently-published Flesh and the Word 4 were fixes for those waiting for new Killian work. Now in Arctic Summer (Masquerade Books, paper, 395 pages, $6.95), he has published a new full-length novel, and the wait was well worth it. Arctic Summer is a semi-historical novel-- the time is 1952, the place upper-class American urban society-- that charts the lives of a group of young gay friends who are trying to make sense of the world and their desires.

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Killian has always had an ear for fresh dialogue and an eye for the absurd in everyday life. In Arctic Summer he manages wonderfully to combine the two. Killian makes connections with his characters' inner lives. He understands what makes people tick on a primal level, and shows us in sly, observant ways. Here, Killian's main character, Liam Reilly-- an absurdly heroic anti-hero-- is a continuation of the male characters from Shy and Bedrooms Have Windows-- but his upper-class status and his cultural aloofness moves Arctic Summer into a new realm for the novelist. You can read Arctic Summer as a critique of US culture, both high and low, and how it acts on teenage sexuality and the way gay people conceive the world. Killian's writing is, as usual, a fine mixture of the staid and the experimental. While his characters' voices are independently clear and strong, they join together forming a tightly controlled chorus of experience that is intense and intelligent. Killian's prose moves us in its simplicity and its directness, but it is only after we have finished a chapter, or the book, that we are struck by its sheer beauty and grace. Arctic Summer is a great novel by a great writer. It is a shame that Killian, even at this point in his career, is not known beyond a select literary circle, but Arctic Summer is as good a novel as you will read this year.

Lesbian fiction has always had the reputation of being, well, wholesome or earnest. Even novels as tough-minded as Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina end up with the reputations as "healing" or "nurturing." This is not the case with The Story of Junk by Linda Yablonsky (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; cloth; 323 pages; $23). Set in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1980s, The Story of Junk tells of a semi-hip urban denizen who becomes addicted to heroin, begins dealing, and gets caught. The nameless narrator is a nice, middle-class girl, works as a chef in a restaurant, wants to write, has a girlfriend, and glides quite gracefully into being a junkie and a dealer. Yablonsky makes all this seem reasonable. The drug world is a new adventure-- a wonderland-- for the narrator, and she, like Alice, is entranced. Yablonsky allows us to see the enticement of this world-- the highs and the peaceful bliss-- but also the lows and the everyday, mundane quality of being a dealer. Scoring on a daily basis is no different than running errands or going to the supermarket. The novel's best parts are those that detail the daily life of addiction and dealing. For the narrator, junk is not a fact, but a part of life, like eating dinner, going to the movies, or making love. The Story of Junk also details a slice of New York life in the late 1980s, in which culture is going slightly awry and people are becoming unmoored. The art world is about to crash, queer identities are in flux, and punk rock is simultaneous on the rise and spinning into oblivion. Yablonsky's writing is perfect: calm, distanced, and out-of-it. Not unlike a good drug, it lulls and entertains, but causes us later to realize that the reality in which we had been suspended is coming apart.

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