A gay coming-of-age novel that focuses primarily on childhood development seemed inherently interesting, given how many homosexual authors more typically embroider same-sex longing and the coming-out process. Unfortunately, young Daniel is a whiny pill so it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for his predicament despite his precociousness and independent thinking. The kid embraces ambivalence as a creed, bleeding any real joy out of his early life.
Michael Amherst capably conveys how Daniel perceives his family, from the time he idolizes his father as a young child, proud to hold his hand and eager to take advantage of the privileges afforded the headmaster's son. That pride curdles into contempt when circumstances--his father's alcoholism--force the man to become an inept farmer in the same community. Even as a pre-teen, Daniel appears to value status above all, which leads him to betray his father more than once in order to curry favor with the men who drink nightly with Daniel's family at the local pub. Needless to say, all but the pervert recoil.
For most of this mercifully brief novel, Daniel treats his mother, a failed actress much younger and more vivacious than her husband, with the degree of sympathy you would expect from a hard-core mama's boy perhaps because she allows him to stay home from school a lot more than he should. Vivacious here is the key word: by the book's conclusion Daniel finally understands the depth of her skillfully sketched bipolarity. Still, he reacts with more fury than sadness at her stagy suicide attempt which calls to mind the death of Lupe Vélez in Hollywood Babylon.
Neither religion nor education provide Daniel with much comfort as he struggles to find where he belongs in the world. When Daniel chooses Judas as his favorite apostle, the vicar isn't surprised given how the budding intellectual has previously tried his patience with persistent questions about Christian dogma. Amherst invests Daniel's relationship with Mr. Miller, his tweedy (and single) English and art teacher, with the most freight. Miller offers Daniel a private, after-school drawing lessons but readers expecting either pedagogical nurture or sexual molestation will be disappointed unless, perhaps, they inhabit the groves of academe which clearly weaned this exercise in mostly aesthetic conflict. Miller bullies Daniel for his appreciation of "The Hay Wain," a nineteenth-century painting by John Constable that depicts their rural English environment.
Miller also invites Philip, a popular but solitary athlete, to join their sessions. Although Daniel initially resents having to share his special status the boys become both friends and rivals for Miller's favor until puberty intervenes. Drama ensues when Daniel complains to his parents about Miller's behavior. Gay solidarity--expressed by either generation--is absent from this classroom.
Here's the rub, although that metaphor is completely absent, too: men, whether straight or gay, are often accused of "thinking" with their dicks, not their heads. Amherst takes pains to distinguish Daniel in this regard while pinpointing the exact moment that self loathing rears its ugly head.
He would like to be this boy [Philip]. Or to have something of his. If he could be someone else, then he would be this boy. This is the boy he is meant to be.
I recognize this passion; its expression not so much. I didn't want to be Kim Posich, who similarly embodied many of Philip's qualities, in the fourth grade; I desperately wanted him to kidnap me.
But that would have been a different, less highbrow book completely devoid of strained Biblical allusions.
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