WHAT I’M READING ... MATT MCEVOY
‘Amid the madness is a fascinating examination of emotional truths’
How to Become a Virgin, published in 1991, may seem an unlikely read for a steamy New Zealand summer, however, the title here refers not to reclaimed virtue but rather to a fresh start in a new city. This second installment of Quentin Crisp’s biography rejoins the self-described “stately old homo” in 1981, as he abandons London for New York City, aged 72. After weathering persecution since the 1930s in a highly conservative England that was unappreciative of his theatrical flamboyance, Crisp first achieved a notorious fame, then found liberation, as New Yorkers embraced him for his eccentricities. In this final part of his life story, Crisp has blossomed into full flower as a living cultural treasure. He recounts the impact of fame late in life as one of very few queer celebrities, and his love affair with America. Always witty and vivacious, it’s also tragic and tender with a liberal sprinkling of hilari-tragic quotable insights: “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”
Jack Remiel Cottrell, in his own words, “makes up for having a very long name by writing very short stories”. Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson is his debut collection of flash and micro-fiction, a delightfully capricious bundle of tales and characters. Like the playful pirouette of a fantail, the book elegantly tumbles from the Bombay Polo Club to the nightmare of a Work and Income office guarded by a sphinx, where the receptionist demands “a sliver of your soul”. Some inventions are barely longer than a paragraph and only a handful are more than a page. Cottrell guides the reader with an elegant sense of space, timing and symmetry. Poignant meditations on existence swim gently alongside brilliantly funny pieces. Road cones become sentient — “they whisper secrets about you” — while time travellers appear on a university campus to head off future genocides by a music student.
Sarah Winman’s Tin Man is a tender, melancholy story of how serendipitous connections can send bittersweet ripples through our lives, long after the person is gone. It begins with Ellis and Michael as two young boys; decades later Annie enters. Winman depicts the complexity of love through the intensity of these young characters, who are full of life and potential: “There’s something about first love, isn’t there? … It’s the measure of all that follows.” Van Gogh’s sunflowers are used to sublime effect as a leitmotif across the decades. The tragic shadow of Aids darkens the story, giving rise to some of Winman’s most heartbreaking descriptions of regret, loneliness and disappointment, “The sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to Earth.” A melancholic state of reflection stayed with me long after I’d finished this book.
Has the romantic fiction of Mills and Boon lost its spark, leaving you unsatisfied? Consider relighting your fire with the lusty new collection by Samuel Te Kani, Please, Call Me Jesus. This anarchic bible of kink is a conflagration of science fiction, sado-masochism and shocking twists, with the occasional tender moment. We are paddling far from the mainstream here, but Te Kani’s intelligent writing carries off his outrageous material with a deft sophistication. The titular piece finds Jesus in a sacrilegious sexual liaison with a suburban woman named Sharon, in a virtual world called Hollywood Hills 2.0: “He stood, stripping away his loincloth ... ” Amid the madness is a fascinating examination of emotional truths, of what it would mean to be truly honest about our strangest, darkest desires.
Matt Mcevoy is the author of 30 Queer Lives: Conversations with LGBTQIA+ New Zealanders (Massey University Press, $40)