Justin Torres shines light on `Blackouts'
A little-known sexuality study, intergenerational dialogue and art are among the acclaimed novel's elements
Justin Torres' “Blackouts” has been 12 years in the making.
In 2011, the author made his literary debut with “We the Animals,” a novel about three brothers growing up in a troubled Brooklyn family. The book drew rave reviews and formed the basis for a 2018 film directed by Jeremiah Zagar.
Torres wrote the book while working a series of bad jobs. But things changed after it was published.
“When I was writing `We the Animals,' I was broke,” he recalls. “After the book came out, I had stability. I got these fancy fellowships, and then I became a professor at UCLA, and I had time to write built into my job. So I wasn't snatching bits of time whenever I could, but instead had it be the center of my life.”
Now he's back with “Blackouts,” which follows a young, unnamed narrator tending to his dying older friend, Juan Gay, who has dedicated his life to his pet project, based on a 1941 book, “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.” (The real-life study was credited to psychiatrist George W. Henry, but much of the work behind it was done by a lesbian polymath named Jan Gay.)
“Blackouts,” which features snippets of art throughout its pages, has been a hit with critics — NPR's Maureen Corrigan called it “ingenious,” while Hamilton Cain with the Star Tribune described it as a “tour de force.” The novel also just won a National Book Award for fiction.
Torres talked about “Blackouts” via telephone from Los Angeles, where he lives. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q
Would you say there is any relation between the narrator of “We the Animals” and the narrator of “Blackouts”?
AOne hundred percent, yeah. I've started saying recently it's the multiverse or whatever. Clearly, the narrator of “We the Animals” and the narrator of “Blackouts” have the same biographical background. They have the same backstory, but the tone and everything else about the books are so different. It's not like you need to read one to understand the other. They exist in different universes, but they are absolutely related to one another.
Q
The narrator and Juan in “Blackouts” are such fascinating characters. Did they come to you at the same time or did one arrive before the other?
AI was writing these stories about the narrator, this young man in his 20s, and I lost the manuscript. I had written a bunch of short stories about this hustler who's in his late 20s, who's drifting through life, and I lost that. I had certain pieces that I'd emailed myself, but everything else was on a laptop that I physically lost. So some of those vestigial elements I worked into what became “Blackouts,” but pretty
soon after that, I started thinking about having this book be a kind of Socratic dialogue. I was really interested in writing about intergenerational conversation and wisdom talking to youth, and I really wanted to have lots of literary allusions. And Juan is a really good character to get the narrator outside of himself. He doesn't know much about the world, and Juan is able to pull him out of himself into the room that they're in together.
Q
Part of the book deals with a reallife 1941 research study, “Sex Variants.” When did you first come across that report?
AQ
Can you talk about the multiple meanings of the title “Blackouts”?
A
The most obvious reference is these erasure poems, these blackout poems that are photocopied images of the original “Sex Variants” study that have been blacked out to say something else than what they originally were saying.
And then there's the idea of lost time and having these blackouts when one becomes too overwhelmed by something, and just the body's defense against too much emotion, or something happening in front of you, and that's what's happening to the narrator.
There's also the idea of death. Juan is literally on his deathbed. The whole book takes place in a small room, with the two of them talking to each other in the dark, because Juan is dying and the desert and bright sun hurt his eyes, so they keep the shades drawn to black out the light. And then there's the historical erasure, what happened to Jan Gay. You can't find biographical information about her, because hers was not a life that was meant to be recorded. People decided to erase her contributions.
I was working in a bookstore in San Francisco called Modern Times, which sadly doesn't exist anymore, but it was an anarchist, collectively owned bookstore. They sold new and used books, and people would sometimes come and bring in donations, and somebody brought in this box of books, and it had a lot of preStonewall touchstones of queer literature, like (Radclyffe Hall's) “The Well of Loneliness” and Jean Genet. It also had this medical study, with all of these naked bodies with blurred faces, and all these drawings of genitalia, and the kind of weird eugenics stuff that's happening in the book. But it also had these amazing first-person testimonies that read like short stories, and somebody had transcribed them with real care.
I started to get obsessed with the kind of competing tones or discourses in the text itself. On the one hand, you could tell that these people had come and volunteered themselves, some of them because they thought that there was something
A wrong with them and they wanted That was really hard. One of the a cure, but a lot of them because they things about doing archival research thought that nothing was wrong with is there's so many striking images. them, and they wanted to share their stories There are just some images that to change social attitudes. That was I can look and look and look at, and really fascinating to me. So I started to those are the ones that are in the book, research how this study came about. where there's something ambiguous
I would find little things, but it took happening in the image itself. I tried to me a really long time to piece it together. emphasize the ambiguity. It's a real invitation Eventually, I found the work of Henry for the reader to read the images L. Minton and Jennifer Terry, and their how they want to read them. work pointed me to Jan Gay. And she They just kind of show up in the was fascinating. She left behind all these text, and you get to fill in the space between children's books that she co-wrote with what you just read. Why is this her partner. She left behind a book she image here? Sometimes it's more explicit wrote about nudism; she started a nudist than others, but sometimes it's colony. She made a film about Buddhism. just this image floating in the middle She did all this amazing stuff. of the text.
Q
How did you decide which art to include in the book?