Like Son
Felicia Luna Lemus (Akashic, 2007)

Well, it sounded good. Set in LA (my hometown) and NY (my current town), a transgendered narrator (Frank) becomes obsessed with Nahui Olin, a Mexican artist, and the subject of a haunting Edward Weston photograph that is given to Frank by his father just before he dies. Great, except: a) Nahui Olin is only used as a backdrop for a loose character study of the narrator; b) the narration leaves much to be desired; and c) the central love story is flaccid and over-explained.

My main problem with this book is the narration, and the manner of handling exposition. I’d say that 75% of this book is point-blank exposition. For example, Frank goes back to see his estranged mother after five years, and in the instance between his “Hello” and her “Who are you,” readers get 2-3 pages of the whole story between the two. Before a reader has the opportunity to experience the estrangement between the the two characters, it’s all explained away.

With so much narration, there is little opportunity for readers to make any of their own connections. It really got me to thinking about the importance of what is NOT told in a narrative–and the old writing workshop adage, “show, don’t tell.” The central love story is between Frank and Nathalie, which is going along just peachily–that is, except for one line inserted a few pages before the relationship disintegrates that essentially explains away their problems in pop-psychotherapy-speak: the narrator wouldn’t allow himself to feel anything and the girlfriend was growing distant. This is the kind of thing that needs to be integrated much more artfully into the readers’ understanding of the characters, not just explained so literally. The entire rest of the story pivoted on this one line.

In other cases, readers are given subjective, emotional perspectives of other characters’ experiences of long-past events–which just doesn’t work from a first-person narrator. The whole point of a first-person narrator is that you get in-depth emotional experiences from just one character; your perception of the narrated world is limited to what the character is able to see/think/feel. This book should have been written from third-person omniscient, because from first person, it’s unbelievable.

What this book did is make me realize why Dennis Cooper is a vital writer: he writes from the inside of unique characters that are rarely ever protagonists in novels. He’s an expert on writing through the filter of his first-person narrators. It’s also why his books are scandalous. He takes a messed-up, marginalized character and places no external moral filter upon him, so readers experience exactly how a rapist, etc. would think. In My Loose Thread, Cooper’s narrator is a young boy who has an incestuous obsession with his younger brother, and a Columbine-like obsession with obliterating his tormentors at high school. Some of his violent thoughts may render the narrative uncomfortable for readers, but it’s an honest character study. Much like Madame Bovary was scandalous because of Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse–it’s the lack of a moral/objective filter that makes first-person narrative wonderful, at its best.

I think Lemus’s book could have benefited from a tighter rein on her first-person narrator–or a switch to third person. The characters are unique and have potential. For a character study, however, it’s surprisingly glossy on the details. There’s no delving into the psychology of changing gender–and though this was likely a conscious decision by Lemus, for me it felt like ignoring the elephant in the room. There were logical places in which it would become an issue in the character’s life, i.e., making out for the first time with a girl, and when this girl (who becomes his long-term girlfriend) wants to have a baby with him. To address this issue would not have made the narrative overly gender-centric (which may have been the author’s fear), it but it was clearly a part of this character’s psychological development, as set up by the narrator. And without exploring this aspect of his personality, I was left feeling a void in those areas.

I read somewhere that Lemus felt she couldn’t write about NYC in the aughts and not include September 11th. This got me to thinking about literature’s responsibility to trauma. I wasn’t in New York when it happened, so I know that I can stake no claim upon the disaster’s full impact. But even despite that fact, it’s probably safe to say that daily life for most does not center around it anymore. This is not a critique of the book, just a general question that the book raised for me, because this has come up before in other books I’ve read. It seems that every book I’ve encountered about New York written in the last few years has some 9/11 element. Is this true of all post-trauma literature? Was there a moral imperative for all Jews to write about the Holocaust up to a point? The Japanese with Hiroshima? Or does it become personal obsession? Will New Orleans literature soon center around Katrina? What happens to trauma in the cultural collective? Is it inescapable? Does it have a shelf-life?