Little Reef, Michael Carroll’s previous collection was a thoroughly enjoyable, layered assemblage of stories set in Florida and populated with gay men. His new collection follows a similar path but presents work that is more challenging, yet just as good. The inner voices of the characters may sometime seem scattered or hard to follow, especially when written in voices that shift in tone, veering into successive thoughts that bring to the surface their personal baggage. Pay attention and you learn much more about the characters than what is relayed in simple dialogue.
The book is loaded with criticism and disdain toward many groups and affiliations that frustrate liberal, aging, gay men. Millennials? “What is the crap they talk about?” Religion? “My family were the milder form of Southern, post-redneck Christian bigot. Hoodless.” Millennials who are religious? “Greed is responsible for half of this, and religion picks up the check for the rest.” Trump voters? There are too many burns to recount but they are subject to the most heated criticism. We learn a new term for the President, “Mango Mussolini.” The election is a “Great White tantrum. National hissy fit. Nationalist shit fit.”
The couples are gay, straight, bisexual, closeted, each having a varied sexual history and still searching as they enter older age. Mix into the well-known history of Key West and its colorful characters and you might not know how a story will play out.
Some themes surface more than once but the collection is varied enough to offer a unique gem in each story. “Key West Funeral” is about a drag queen that commits suicide. Stories of the deceased are told by the locals and seem integrated into the town’s quirkiness.
My notes in preparing this review are peppered with phrases and descriptors Carroll uses to evoke the characters and settings. In “Every Night, a Splendor,” the bar “was a dirty little theme park. Hornyland. Ass world. Dick city.” The characters go back and forth, at once thinking “Key West is skanky,” then “Key West is sexy.” It depends on your circumstances. The drag performers are referred to as “The Cher” or “The Beyonce.” Whether this suggests singularity of the performers or the lazy references of the bar patrons is open to debate.
Perhaps the best story in the collection is the last, “The Book About Perry.” Though it is unfair to assume Carroll’s own life dictates the story, it contains so many references to the main character’s situation with “his older, celebrated, author husband,” that a reader can easily contrast the story to Carroll’s husband, Edmund White. The premise is that the younger partner is in Key West, trying to write a memoir about life with the gay-famous Perry. Unsure whether he can complete the memoir, he thinks that a rejection from the publisher will “sound like nothing more than (a) condolence note.” He stays in a small inn and wants to finish the memoir to “capitalize on Perry’s fame among a rapidly dying readership: gay males.” Not only do health issues harken the end of Perry’s life but the thought that he and his generation are the last bastion of serious readers makes one despair.
This is a plea to folks that much will be lost if we do not read, celebrate and support our best authors. It might have seemed unthinkable a few decades ago but is an imminent reality if our culture loses these stories and voices. Good for Michael Carroll for doing his part to document our people and time.
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REVIEW: STEPHEN COYQueerguru Contributor STEPHEN COY has been an avid reader all his (very long) life ? and is finally putting his skills to good use. He lives in Provincetown full time with his husband Jim, having finally given up the bright lights of Boston and now haunts the streets mumbling to himself that no one reads anymore …
Labels: 2019, book review, Michael Carroll, short stories, Stephen Coy
