The House on Brooke Street - Hardcover

Bartlett, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525942734 ISBN 13: 9780525942733

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1997

Synopsis

A gay man named Mr. Page reminisces about his association with a wealthy young man named Mr. Clive, a relationship that took him from Turkish bath steam rooms to Mayfair dining rooms and released him from his previous humdrum life

About this title

About the Author

Neil Bartlett is the artistic director of the Lyric Theatre in London. His works include the music-theatre piece Sarrasine, which received rave reviews on tour in New York. He is also the author of Who Was that Man?, a biography of Oscar Wilde. He lives in London, England.

Reviews

The author of the headily baroque Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall returns with a similarly overwrought novel played in a minor key. The story here opens in London in 1953, as a department store clerk, Mr. Page, eschewing his usual elaborate, lonely Christmas dinner ("except the drink"), opens his diary to describe his relations, 30 years ago, with the aristocratic Clive B. Vivian. Although Bartlett interpolates historical information into the novel, the dominant voice is Page's, rendered with a sharp ear for irony and pathos. The plot, by contrast, is deliberately murky. As the story unfolds, and the diary entries grow more forthcoming, we learn that the plebeian Page and the aristocratic Vivian are physical doubles, sharing even the same birthday ("You're my long-lost twin," one says to the other); that each is ambivalent about his homosexuality; and that both are infatuated with Vivian's servant, the white-blond Gabriel, who's 19. Bartlett's doppelgangers-and their obsessive and ultimately destructive relationship-seem intended to dramatize the psychic price one pays for living in an oppressive, homophobic society. Yet this novel is populated not with compelling presences but with stereotypes-the decadent aristocrat, the bibulous gay man trapped in the closet, the innocent-seeming blond object of desire with the name of an angel. Even Bartlett's clever linguistic and narrative gamesmanship can't bring these puppets fully to life.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This strange, brooding piece of fiction by the author of Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall (Plume, 1992) is set in London during Christmas week, 1956, where our narrator, the lonely 53-year-old Mr. Page, attempts to deal with his grief and the truths of his life?that his male lover is dead and that he is?yes, he really is?gay. The dark and convoluted journey to his realization is the wonderful substance of this book. Mr. Page retells his tale several times, pretending alternately that it all happened to someone else in some other time. A part of the book reads like a crime novel as Mr. Page ferrets out the facts about events that took place 30 years before. Here, the real crime is the gay narrator's life in the closet, and Bartlett illuminates his character's closeted, fearful mind as he effectively captures a sense of gay life in the past (Christopher Bram comes to mind). Highly recommended for general collections as well as those with gay and lesbian materials.?Roger W. Durbin, Univ. of Akron Lib., Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The story centering on the house of the title is told in flashback as Mr. Page, a middle-class London retail manager with a taste for opulence, begins his memoirs on Christmas Eve, 1956. His once mundane world was forever altered when, in the 1920s, he met a wealthy, intriguing stranger while leaving a bathhouse on Jermyn Street. Both men were about to turn 21, and both lived out desires then forbidden. Physically, they could have been twins, but financially, they were worlds apart, as Page makes clear in his recollections of the glamour and privilege of his counterpart's life--and the deception accompanying it. Rendered as memoirs that view and review the past, each time as though with a different lens, Bartlett's novel is a lush, sumptuous tapestry of mood and memory, and each ripple discloses new details and different insights as it evokes the gay life of London at a time when homoeroticism was "a love that dare not speak its name." Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525942734
• ISBN 13: 9780525942733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224