Three Novels by Gay Australian Neil Drinnan: Glove Puppet, Pussy's Bow, Quill

Inadvertently, I read gay Australian novelist Neil Drinnan's three novels in the reverse of their order of publication. It is probably just as well that I read the third one, Quill , first, because it is the one I like best after having gotten around to reading the two earlier ones. I don't know that it has more to "say" than Glove Puppet, but Quill is wittier, defter, and more palatable to a general audience than Glove Puppet; Pussy's Bow is more a "crowd-pleaser" than either its predecessor or is successor, and has a softer "message" than the other two.

Quill made me imagine Drinnan, whose website says he was " born in Melbourne, Australia, sometime in the 1960s." as the Australian Armistead Maupin, an analogy Glove Puppet would not have suggested; in Glove Puppet, Drinnan was striving to be a bad boy from Oz, more the Aussie Dennis Cooper than the Australian Armistead Maupin.

Boys just want to have fun? No: also to have power and to take risks

Glove Puppet is a very dark comedy of laws and mores and social assumptions. It has some very graphic sex (and I am not easily taken aback by sexual explicitness!). It also shows how someone (the narrator) who knows all about safer sex has unsafe sex. Plus, it implicitly challenges taboos that have come to be upheld more fervently than ever before even while the "sexual revolution" has washed many others away. Despite the generally breezy tone of its narrator, Glove Puppet is not a light-hearted or light book.

The 21-year-old narrator Vaslav Usher, was born Johnny Smith and raised in England by his junkie-prostitute mother until she overdosed in London's Victoria Station (a nod to "The Importance of Being Earnest," I assume, though he is not left in the baggage-check). Johnny is rescued or voluntarily kidnapped by Shamash Usher, the gay cofounder and lead dancer of an Australian dance company who (ever so coincidentally...) is in England to take back to Australia the seven-year-old son he had never seen. However, his ex-wife has driven into a lake with their son, killing them both.

Shamash comes from a rich and socially prominent Sydney family, and provides Vaslav (the name of the drownded son who Johnny pretends to be) a considerably plusher and more privileged life than Johnny's dead mother or the English state would have. The boy is in a great hurry to grow up and knows a good deal about manipulating horny men from having watched his mother in action. Shamash tries and tries to tell his adopted son to slow down and savor his youth, but falls into the vortex of Johnny's lust. The sexual coupling of boy and man (which no one else knows is not incest--in biological terms at least) becomes public knowledge. The men who corrupted Vaslav (with his more-than-eager participation) are not celebrities, and it is the celebrity (Shamash) whose life is smashed by the media and the legal system.

More a survivor than his mother was, Vaslav survives, sells his version of the story to a tabloid, and writes the book that the reader can imagine leading to prosecution of the real villain (Ashley). I think that someone who was neither a reader nor college-educated would not make some of the literary allusions Vaslav's memoir includes, nor produce some of the florid locutions it sometimes includes.

I know from the shock and denial I recall from college classmates when we read Freud's case study of "Little Hans," that there are many who refuse to consider (let alone acknowledge!) that children are anything but innocent and are incapable of seductiveness. Those with such assumptions (who probably don't read my epinion reviews anyway...) would hate Glove Puppet. The 21-year-old portrays a very knowing 7-year-old, though the 7-year-old did not understand some of what the 21-year-old looking back does. The seductive (rapacious?) boy of 12-15 did not understand some of the dynamics of power and manipulated trust, particularly what Shamash's lover, Ashley, was up to, and multiple disasters result, but even after them, Vaslav does not deny that he wanted to molest various adults or even consider that he was the victim of the desires of the adults. Such a perspective shocks many, including many gay men--and the book might make any contact with adolescent boys even scarier for gay men.

Readers are able to maintain a belief that Lolita was not conscious of her seductiveness and that Humbert Humbert was rationalizing his predations. Since Johnny/Vaslav rather than Shamash is the narrator of Glove Puppet, a similar interpretation is impossible. As in Lolita, the man who engages in pederasty (Humbert Humbert is a pederast, Shamash is not) is destroyed, though it is jealousy and delusion (and Quilty, if he is not a delusion of the jealous Humbert) and the indifference of Lolita that destroy Humbert Humbert, whereas is it the media (for whom celebrities are fodder), laws, and prison systems that destroy Shamash, whom Johnny/Vaslav continues to love.

I found most of the incidents of the narrative present tedious and some of the turns of phrase too literary, and the premise of the book (the substitution of one seven-year-old for a dead one) requires a leap of suspending disbelief. I guess the transgressions are too aggressively "in your face" (as in the violence of Dennis Cooper's novels), and can easily imagine many readers being shocked and/or annoyed by the book. I think it very interesting and certainly challenging.

Po-mo as the narrative is (or the narratives, the three books feeling different from each other though all told by Johnny/Vaslav, with some interpolated texts pasted in), there is also something very late-19th-century naturalism about it. Naturalism (Zola, Stephen Crane) wallowed in fated degradation and genetic determinism. Drinnan enjoys dragging readers through the gutter in a similar manner, and it is easy to read Glove Puppet as a case study of "bad genes" (hereditary viciousness and prenatal drug exposure) emerging to negate the effects of an improved environment. (I might have picked up echoes of such genetic determinism in Pussy's Bow, if I'd read it after reading Glove Puppet. Instead, my reading out of order helped me pick up some of the Maupin-like cast of supportive nonbiological family in Glove Puppet, the aging, wise housekeeper, Thel, in particular) and I'd recommend my own backward reading trajectory to Drinnan's first novel.

n entertaining tale of intertwined lives of characters with a wide range of background

A n entertaining tale of intertwined lives of characters with a wide range of background

Pussy's Bow did not immediately charm me -- or seize me. It is one of the books that I like more after having finished reading it than I liked while I was reading it, though it was sufficiently interesting to finish. At the start it seems to be a thriller with a fagbashing leading in unexpected ways to a corpse and its disposal. That unusual course of events leads to blackmail, but this seeming primary plot evaporates, though I guess one could say that it is resolved.

There is another mystery that emerges, one set in the Great Depression and involving the ruin of a Jewish developer, plus a rape and a robbery, a suicide and a suicide attempt. Nevertheless, Pussy's Bow is not a crime novel and the primary mystery is that of the human heart (straight and gay). The focus is on the household occupying a large house with a turret, the turret from which the ruined developer hanged himself after his business was destroyed by the father of a WASP woman with whom he had been involved. (And, let me tell, you, "involved" is the right word!).

The mostly renovated art deco mansion, built in 1924, is owned by a promiscuous gay doctor who is to some degree in love with Dixon, a Cambridge plummy-accented Brit who writes for a Melbourne (Australia) real estate magazine. Dixon, who also has a busy sex life away from home, is attracted to the third resident, Duang, a recently successful Vietnamese painter. Duang is attracted to Dixon, but has love and sex less separated. Doc decides to hire a houseboy and chooses a handsome but naive (new-to-town) 19-year old who has changed his name from Shane Hutton to Murray Fox and is questioning what his sexual orientation is. In this he has plenty of in-house help. Plus there is the neighbor (the one with a cat) with desires of her own, Claudette, and with connections (in particular a lesbian photographer) to help the hayseed launch a career as a model.

As the blackmail plot fades, Pussy's Bow emerges as a "buddy" novel. In that there are major straight (and bisexual) characters, it is more like Armistead Maupin's Barbary Lane tales of the city than like Ethan Mordden's "Buddies" series. The later "Tales of the City" also included disposing of a corpse and disappointment in the selfishness of one of the residents. And parents visiting from the provinces (here the mother and sister of Shane/Murray). Also like "Tales of the City," there is a lot of plot with many subplots and subsidiary characters.

The part of Mrs. Madrigal is split between Doc and Claudette. And there is a much bigger part for an Asian character. This is, in itself, notable, since gay Asians are invisible in gay Anglo fiction in the US. Duang and Shane/Murray are the two most fully developed characters in Pussy's Bow (or is it that Doc and Dixon are more familiar types in gay male fiction? Maybe.) Drinnan convincingly sketches backgrounds for characters from an impressively wide range of backgrounds.

There is more graphic sex in Pussy's Bow than in either Quills or in Maupin's serial novels. There are also a lot of "party drugs" consumed (plus some beingsold by Dixon).

The novel is an enjoyable page-turner. Drinnan's look at how having one's character and "private life" being expropriated by a writer in Quill is more interesting than the portrait of edging in and out of fashion and sexual "fast lanes" is, but Drinnan peppers both books with epigrammatic insights and fallible but ultimately sympathetic characters (young and old, male and female, gay and straight, rural and urban).

------

In that the neighbor cat does not play any significant role in the book, I was puzzled by the title and asked an Australian friend about it. He said that "Pussy's bow" refers to where the bow is tied -- that is the neck -- and means "I've had it up to here" (with the flattened hand against the throat). Necks are central to the book's plot with one strangulation and two nooses.

The dangers of associating with writers (vampires for your experiences)

I understand that one cannot literally "have your cake and eat it, too," and that wise men and women don't try. I don't, however, understand why many think of it as immoral to try. Foolish to try, because metaphorically having it both ways is overwhelmingly doomed to failure, but immoral? I don't think so.

Drinnan does manage the difficult feat of having his cake and eating it, too in his third novel, Quill. In this particular extension of the metaphor, he finds a way to combine some pretentious melodramatic writing and contemptuous dismissals of overwriting and self-dramatization within the same book.

Whereas his 2000 novel Quill has a mostly offstage Australian gay novel, Elliot Barnard, whose very graphic and very autobiographical writings are criticized and bemoaned by those who have been closest to him. . . with large chunks included and providing keys not only to the character of fictionalized and recollecting Elliot Barnard but into the characters of his once and future lover Blaise (fictionalized as Pascal an obvious transformation that eludes Blaise's subsequent partner Woody, who does notice that his own character's name, Wolfie, is not very different) and of his mother who is dreading reading Elliot's autobiography and being frustrated in advance that he is, once again, going to have the last word.

The novel is divided into two parts, both of which are filled with flashbacks. Each has a Dorothy Parker quatrain so apt that I have to quote it. The first one, from "Reuben's Children") is
Accursed from their birth they be
Who seek to find monogamy
Pursuing it from bed to bed--
I think they would be better dead.

The Parkerian hypocrite here is Woodrow who makes sanctimonious Andrew Sullivan-like prescriptions about monogamy, particularly to his cowed lover Blaise, with whom Woodrow began a relationship while Blaise was Elliot's lover. Also like Sullivan, Woodrow does not practice what he preaches.

Woodrow has more reasons than just animus for his lover's former partner to forbid Blaise not to read Elliot's new novel, Je Louse. Each of them covertly does read the book, which is mined. There is an unmetaphorical explosion as well as the detonation of the one contained in Je Louse.

(Some might think that Woody is exaggerated, but I have a friend in a relationship with someone more controlling, unreasonable, and hypocritical than Woody with very similarly internalized homophobia. Truth being stranger than fiction has kept me from writing about their relationship.)

Both halves of the book explore the hurt of those whose experiences are appropriated by writers. Outrages are generally not about what is invented but about what is accurately transcribed from reality.

The second part begins with a "Thought for a Sunshiny Morning":
It costs me never a stab nor squirm
To read by chance upon a worm.
'Aha, my little dear,' I say,
'Your clan will pay me back one day.'

The present of the second part is a post-funeral reception in what had been Elliot's and Blaise's apartment. The focus is on Elliot's mother -- or rather Bernie's, since he inverted the order of his given name Elliot Bernard. The occasion and the mementos, particularly photos, of her dead son, make her reflect on the son she bore who never fit into the rural society in which they lived and was rejected by his more conventionally macho brother and the father who preferred that brother. Chunks of Elliot's soon-to-be-published memoir alternate with discussions among mourners and Rose Elliot's reveries.

Without the contrived digging of, say, "Citizen Kane," Elliot's life history emerges convincingly. He ultimately seems to have heroically been himself and his mother educates the survivors by shaking some of their smugness.

The ending is a bit pat, but the very curving road to it is entertaining as well as pointed. Although there is not much graphic sex in the book, there are allusions and invocations of the fervent pursuit of sexual pleasures. These are part of why you can't keep young gay men "down on the farm" when they've seen the bright lights and multiple kinds of freedom of the big city (the book is set mostly in Sydney, though Elliot is in New York for the first half of the book, and much of the second reaches back to the childhood and adolescence on a farm near Darlinghurst).

(Having vouched for the plausibility of Woodrow, I might also note that Rose seems very like a woman from Missouri I met whose son had some of the mordant Dorothy Parker wit of Elliot and who also died of AIDS. The mix of understanding and bafflement rings true to me.)