Blackouts
A Novel
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- €17.99
Publisher Description
Juan Gay is on his deathbed. He has decided to spend his last days in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert, which was an asylum in another lifetime. There, a young man tends to this dying soul - someone who Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since.
As the end approaches, the two trade stories - resurrecting lost loves, lives, mothers and fathers - and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of pathology and oppression. Charged with sifting through Juan's belongings, our narrator uncovers a copy of Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, its pages blacked out, censored, reduced down to poetic dispatches. And, as he sifts through the manuscript, another story is told: that of Jan Gay - a radical, queer anthropologist - whose ground-breaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.
Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, on the ways in which stories sustain histories. Both emotionally and intellectually daring, Justin Torres blends fact with fiction - drawing from historical records, screenplays, testimony and image - force us to look again at the world we have inherited and the narratives we have received.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Torres's ambitious sophomore outing (following We the Animals) intersperses a fictional biography of early 20th-century sex researcher Jan Gay with an enticing if murky present-day narrative. The unnamed 20-something narrator visits a dying man named Juan, whom he first met at 17, when they were patients at a psychiatric hospital. Now, after having accidentally flooded his apartment, the narrator moves into Juan's rundown building (inhabited, in Juan's words, by a "badling of queer ducks") and promises to carry out Juan's unfinished project involving a research study published in 1941—Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns by George W. Henry—that draws on Gay's research. Juan's copy of the book is heavily redacted, leaving "little poems of illumination... a counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr. Henry's agenda," to de-pathologize Henry's case studies and restore the egalitarian spirit of Gay's groundwork. Juan and the narrator's dialogues can feel contrived, but just as the Sex Variants erasure poems sparkle with possibility, so too does Torres make fruitful use of references to literature and art, including a Carl Van Vechten photo of a famous gay male ballet dancer and a children's book by Gay's partner Zhenya, the latter of which proves to contain deliciously queer subtext. At its best, this captures the spirit of Torres's pangs of inspiration.
