Buddies: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (Buddies, 2) - Softcover

Mordden, Ethan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312010052 ISBN 13: 9780312010058

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1987

Synopsis

"What unites us, all of us, surely is brotherhood, a sense that our friendships are historic, designed to hold Stonewall together," muses on character in Ethan Mordden's Buddies. This need for friendship, for nonerotic affection, for buddies, shines forth as an American obsession from Moby-Dick through Of Mice and Men to The Sting. And American gay life has built upon and cherished these relationships, even as it has dared-perhaps its most startling iconoclasm-to break new ground by combining romance and friendship: one's lover is one's buddy.

This book is about those relationships-mostly gay but some straight and even a few between gays and straights. Here also are fathers and brothers and stories of men in their youth, when rivalry often develops more naturally than alliance. In Buddies Mordden continues to map the unstoried wilderness of gay life today.

About this title

About the Author

Ethan Mordden is the author of dozens of books, both fiction and nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker and numerous other magazines and journals. He lives in Manhattan.

From Publishers Weekly

Homosexuality is a sexual inclination, but being gay, observes Mordden in his third fictional work (after One Last Waltz, is about joining a city culture. One's lover is also one's buddy, which he says gives gays one up on straights. Mordden writes like early Henry Miller; instead of linear plot development, there are well-crafted vignettes, structured like short stories that interlock as we jerkily progress from the narrator's childhood to the present. But while Miller was a participant, Mordden has chastely cast himself as the objective observer. In an introduction, he notes that "these are more pieces than stories, counting character studies, nostalgic recollections and essayistic analyses as well as outright tales." Depicting himself as a brat of a child, he also describes his family as the enemy. ("You know how parents send clan photographs at Christmas? The Morddens send their portrait by Charles Addams.") The adult Mordden uses his writing skill like a meat cleaver. He wheedles and cajoles stories from his friends, though they all know that what they tell him goes straight into the typewriter. The gay community may receive this book with some acclaim, for it is a finely drawn portrait of a lifestyle that blossomed before AIDS struck terror into the culture; but one wonders whether straights will have the same patience with the unpleasant, skulking character Mordden paints of himself, for the narrator is a tough guide to accompany.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0312010052
• ISBN 13: 9780312010058
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240