American Studies - Softcover

Merlis, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1514788349 ISBN 13: 9781514788349

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 1994

Synopsis

Los Angeles Times Book Prize: Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Ferro-Grumley Award for Distinction in Gay Writing Infused with desire, betrayal, and healing, Mark Merils writes with dark humor of gay life in this century. Meet Reeve who thinks his life is over: his career is at an end and his landlord is evicting him because he made too much noise when a hustler beat him up. As he lies in his hospital bed, he finds himself brooding about the parallel ruin of his mentor Tom Slater, a famous American literary scholar. There is the further distraction of the patient in the next bed, a silent youth who arouses the desire in Reeve for straight men. One of the finest first novels to appear in many a moon. Its simple, noble, graceful prose refreshes the very language, and its unsquinting portrayal of gay men is searing and authentic. Merlis’s novel belongs to the best of contemporary literature, gay or other. – Library Journal Mark Merlis’s first novel accomplishes that great thing that gives fiction its claim on truth: It creates a world so real that readers believe they live in it...This is a book that transcends genre in portraying the abyss that divides one ostracized human soul from all others. – Los Angeles Times The power of this novel is in Merlis’s writerly skill (his fiercely perfect timing, his flawless, always believable diction), in his comprehension of American cultural history, and ultimately in his human wisdom...With this novel, gay literature enters maturity. – James White Review Stunningly good...Haunting, funny, and masterfully written, American Studies provides keen insight into our own history and our lives. -- Genre Desolating, bitterly comic, beautifully written...an eye-opening and heart-opening book. – Richard Wilbur

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Merlis’s novels include American Studies, about a closeted literature professor in the McCarthy era; An Arrow’s Flight, a riff on the Philoctetes myth, set simultaneously in the ancient and modern worlds; and Man About Town, a tale about politics and growing older set in Washington, DC. His most recent novel, JD, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in spring 2015. Merlis’s work has won the Los Angeles Times book prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Ferro-Grumley award for distinction in gay writing.

From Kirkus Reviews:

This ambitious and intelligent first novel by a D.C.-based gay writer focuses on the bad old days before Stonewall and one victim of the dual McCarthyisms of red-hunting and gay-baiting. Merlis has been trying unsuccessfully to finish and publish a first novel for many years, finally reaching his goal at 44, and this product of that struggle betrays its troubled origins only in its occasional verbosity. That is to say, it reads like the work of someone who has had a lot of writing bottled up in him for many years, not an entirely bad thing for a first novel. The book's narrator, Reeve, is a middle-level federal bureaucrat lying in a hospital bed after ``an especially unrewarding encounter with rough trade'' has left him battered and nearly blinded in one eye. Given so much time to reflect on his wasted life, the 62-year-old Reeve thinks back to his friend and mentor, Tom Slater, a prominent literary critic who committed suicide after being hounded by a '50s witch-hunt that threatened to expose his homosexuality and a former dalliance with the Communist Party. Reeve slowly recounts his friendship with Slater (based loosely on F.O. Matthiessen, who virtually created the field of American Studies in the 1940s), his own ambivalent coming to terms with his gayness, and the events that led to Slater's suicide. All of this is intermingled with a no less detailed recollection of the night that landed the narrator in his current predicament, on the verge of losing his job and his apartment. All of the events are retold with a bitter, wry humor that leads gradually to a surprising and thoroughly satisfying denouement. In spite of being a little too long and sometimes overwritten, this is a substantial first novel and one that promises much from its author. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1514788349
• ISBN 13: 9781514788349
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 302