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Drew Payne

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  1. Drew Payne
    Beryl Bainbridge, at her best, always had a dark view of life. It wasn’t just the unhappiness of life she wrote about so well but the pain and regret under that unhappiness. This novel is a fine example of the darkness she found in ordinary people’s lives.
    It is set in Liverpool in 1945. The war is finally turning and the city is awash with American GIs, but this is still the world of ration books, shortages and make do and mend. In this cold and austere world, naïve and immature Rita lives with her two aunts, Nellie and Margo. Her mother has died and her father is incapable of raising a daughter. Rita dreams of being a GI bride, her head was turned by the fantasy of the Hollywood films she escaped to in the local Picture House. At a party organised by a neighbour she meets her own GI. She rapidly falls in love with him, though she is far more in love with the idea of having her own GI than with the man himself. Her aunts, though, are certain that this young man is not suitable for their niece.
    This is not romantic fiction, it is a drama of downtrodden lives; Rita’s relationship with her GI has no breath of romance about it. The aunts’ lives are as dull and washed out as the wartime city around them. Nellie is the matronly character forced to be the head of the family. Margo is what was once called “blousy”, an unmarried middled-aged woman who behaves as if she was still young, though here she is no caricature; she is a woman who is desperate not to let life pass her by, even though it is rapidly doing so.
    The male characters are very much secondary characters here, but this is a novel about the women at the heart of it and it is no less a novel for that.
    This was the first Bainbridge novel I read. As a teenager, I was wary of literary fiction, finding it highbrow and inaccessible. With this novel, I was gripped by its dark opening and carried along by its dark plot. I was surprised that a novel with the plaudits this one had would also have such an interesting and readable plot. The characters were also all too recognisable.
    Rereading it recently, I found it had lost none of its dark appeal. This is Beryl Bainbridge at her height. Though a short novel, none of its pages are wasted and it still lingers in the memory long after I finished reading it.
     
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  2. Drew Payne

    Book Review: Somewhere This Way

    By Drew Payne,


    Book review
    Anthologies can be interesting reads and, in the past, have introduced me to writers I might not have found in other ways. If it’s by one author then it can be an interesting introduction to an author’s work or else it is a way to see how an author handles writing short stories, which are different form from novel writing. If it’s an anthology of different writers then there is a chance to discover new authors. Unfortunately, this anthology did not provide any of this.
    I found this anthology so frustrating because none of the stories developed any of their themes. None of the stories had any character development or even led anywhere. After finishing each story, I was left with the feeling, “Was that it?” None reached any sort of resolution.
    Now, short stories are not novels, I don’t expect complete character story arcs or resolution of big themes, but they are stories and stories do need to take the reader somewhere. All the stories here left me feeling frustrated because they didn’t go anywhere.  Some of the stories had an interesting premise but did not follow through on that premise, ending too soon or just not exploring that premise. One story, which illustrates my frustration with this anthology, was about two work colleagues sharing a car to a team-building event. They bought coffees; they argued over what music to play in the car; the car got a flat tyre; they waited for the breakdown van to arrive; they restarted their journey and it started to rain, but they didn’t reach their team-building event. The characters didn’t share anything, they didn’t get to know each other, they didn’t contact in any way; they were just the same at the beginning as they were at the end of the story, nothing had changed or been challenged. What was the point of this story? It was just a catalogue of their morning.
    For an anthology to have one story as frustrating and pointless as this is one thing, but to have a whole collection of stories like that is another thing. It had to be a conscious decision by the editor, but why would someone collect together a group of stories that all left the reader feeling so disappointed? I don’t know.
    My advice is not to waste your time with this anthology, I wish I hadn’t.
     
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  3. Drew Payne
    It is Hollywood, Los Angeles, 1943 and 19-year-old Nathan Reed’s life is turned upside down. Nathan, an innocent who has recently moved to Los Angeles, has everything changed when Hoyt Stubblefield ambles into his life. Within a week of their first meeting, in the Hollywood Boulevard bookshop where Nathan works, Nathan is living with Hoyt in Hoyt’s run-down upstairs apartment and sharing his bed.
    This marks the start of a whole new life for Nathan, an adventurous roller coaster ride of experiences. Hoyt, an artist and painter, introduces him to a whole new world of ideas, books, music, painting and the underground world that was gay life in 1940s Los Angeles. In return, Nathan is his pupil, model and lover. But this is no easy, romantic love story. Hoyt is as mysterious and secretive as he is handsome and charming, leading Nathan into an increasingly fraught and confusing life.
    Joseph Hansen is best known for his series of detective novels, featuring Dave Brandstetter (one of literature’s first openly gay detectives), but with Living Upstairs he again proves he was an accomplished novelist.
    The central relationship, between Nathan and Hoyt, is drawn with sensitivity and care. This is Nathan’s first relationship and Hansen perfectly captures that heady rush of lust and romance that so often makes up our first love affair—in this case it is also all on Nathan’s side.
    This novel is also full of other extremely well-drawn characters, the kind of characters that are not present in Hollywood films of the time or later. Hansen shows his ability to capture his characters in one or two well-drawn paragraphs, so from the moment we meet them we recognise the person.
    The atmosphere of this novel is evocative of a very different time and place. Not just period detail, though there is plenty of that, but this novel also has a deep feeling of its time and place. Hansen knew this world well, the fringe world of 1940s Hollywood, not just the underground homosexual world but also that of American communists and the poor on the fringes of tinsel town, and evokes it equally as well (the scene where Nathan and Hoyt, in a desperate bid to raise money, sell a pair of homoerotic paintings to a deeply closeted gay man is so telling).
    The novel is written in the present tense and solely from Nathan’s perspective. This style of writing is not to everyone’s taste, but I would suggest persevering with it because otherwise you might miss an excellent novel. This is Joseph Hansen at his very best and not to be passed over.
     
    Find it here on Amazon


     

  4. Drew Payne

    Book Review: Arkansas by David Leavitt

    By Drew Payne,


    Book review
    Arkansas is a collection of three novellas that show David Leavitt at his best, exploring the lives and emotions of his characters.
    The first story is The Term Paper Artist, which is the closest he has come to writing a sex comedy. The narrator is a disgraced novelist who is hiding at the home of his professor father. He soon becomes involved in accepting sexual favours from jock-students in return for writing English literary essays for them. Soon, word spreads, and he has several jocks and essays on the go at the same time. This being a David Leavitt story, it isn't a fun, rushed tale of sexed-up jocks and Eng. Lit. essays; rather the story is about a writer with writer's block and the strange course of events that releases it.
    Next is The Wooden Anniversary. Here, David Leavitt revisits two characters, Celia and Nathan, who have been featured in his previous short story collections. Celia is now living in Italy and running an Italian Cookery School for Americans. Nathan is visiting her with an old friend, Lizzy, a narrator who is always the last person to know anything. The reunion is not a happy one. Celia is married, but her husband prefers to spend most of his time with his mistress, and Nathan is still desperately searching for a lover, which he has been doing his entire adult life. The friends go sightseeing in the local area, there's a little holiday romance, and then the fireworks erupt. In typical David Leavitt style, this is a slow-burn story that only explodes at the end. This next Celia and Nathan story can feel like one is revisiting old friends or perhaps witnessing an unwelcome soap opera, depending on how one warms to them. Personally, I find them fascinating as they illustrate David Leavitt's take on the disasters of human relationships. You don’t have to had read any of the other stories featuring these characters to enjoy this one.
    The last novella is Saturn Street. Out of all the novellas, this one is the strongest, carrying its narrator on a greater emotional journey than the previous two. Jerry Roth, a writer lost in Hollywood, narrates Saturn Street. He has come to Hollywood to work on his screenplay, but instead, he sits around his apartment watching Dr Delia (a TV psychotherapist he never calls) and formalist gay porn videos (which he doesn’t find erotic). To break the monotony, he volunteers with Angels, a charity that supplies daily meals to people with Aids in LA. His regular round takes in a mixed bag of people, including a man who only wears orange sneakers and an IV. One of the characters he visits is Phil, a handsome ex-carpenter. Soon, Jerry falls in quiet, unrequited love with Phil. This isn’t the world of grand passions; Jerry and Phil don’t end up rolling across the carpet in hot sex, nor do they end together as a couple. Instead, Jerry quietly and secretly loves Phil as Phil’s health deteriorates. This is the territory where David Leavitt excels, with the small passions of everyday life. He carefully and empathetically charts Jerry’s unrequited love and how this moves him on in his life, but more sensitively, he describes the physical downward spiral of Phil’s health. This story shows David Leavitt’s great strength, charting modern-day gay life, and though this story has no great plot, the emotional journey of it more than carried me along.
    Arkansas shows David Leavitt’s power in mapping the emotional life of urban gay men and all the highs and lows that come with that. Though no grand passions, the emotions here have that sharp taste of reality. Don’t be put off by this book being made up of three novellas; David Leavitt packs much more into each one than lesser writers do into whole novels.

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