“The door closes. He’s gone. I’m alone.”
Moore’s narrator feels he’s hard-wired for abandonment, allergic to reciprocated love, only happy when he’s being rejected. Loneliness is the one constant in his life, the one companion that never leaves. “Loneliness can be the greatest gift”, he says.
The fragmented nature of the text mirrors the fragmented nature of the self, of reality, of life, and love and desire in the postpostmodern queer world. Accounts of the narrator’s tormented childhood juxtapose scenes from his recent relationship with Daniel and the break-up, ruminations on cruising pre- and post-Grindr, and in sections reminiscent of Dennis Cooper’s Sluts, online reviews of an escort called Joseph.
Like Eliot in The Waste Land, these fragments are shored against the narrator’s ruin. Here, the waste land is contemporary gay experience: of love, of apps, of drugs, hook-ups, hookers, and broken hearts, relationships terminated due to too much damage, too much damage creating a solitude as comforting as it is alienating. Because our experience of reality is often highly fragmented and without meaningful narrative; because it’s subjective and subjectivity is unstable, contingent, and permanently in flux, our stories are always going to be unreliable. Contemporary queer narratives embrace or at least reflect, this. Moore’s short novel blasts its themes in a scattergun approach that excoriates.
As harrowing as this novel is to read, however, in my opinion, it’s ultimately a celebration, a paean, to the abject state of being alone and the romance of promiscuity. Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature calls it the essential solitude and I’d hazard a guess that it’s more prevalent among writers and artists, for whom being alone is not only an existential reality fuelling thought and sublime creation but also a necessary state for creation.
Thomas Moore’s writing has appeared in various publications in Europe and America. His novella, GRAVES (2011), and his book of poems, The Night Is An Empire(2013), were both published by Kiddiepunk. His first novel, A Certain Kind of Light(2013), was published by Rebel Satori Press. His book of poems, Skeleton Costumes, was published by Kiddiepunk in 2014 and again as an expanded second edition in 2015. Thomas Moore’s third novel,Alone, was released in June 2020.
Alone is available from the publishers' Amphetamine Sulphate
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2021, book review, Jonathan Kemp, Thomas Moore
