Part of His Story

novel by the award-winning poet/art critic

An elegy to love lost and found in which poet Corn (Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, 1990) tests the waters of fiction for the first time. Avery Walsh, like all expatriates, is on the lam. A successful New York playwright, Avery is in Britain just now, taking his time over a biography he's been commissioned to write of the 18th- century London playwright Colley Cibber. Not anyone's idea of a workaholic, Avery manages to keep his heart in his work because it's dangerous to do otherwise: His lover Joshua has recently died of AIDS, and there's little joy in thinking of their lives together, though that is what he mostly does. ``Certainly,'' he asserts, ``I don't plan to come off as broken down with bereavement and sorrow (but I am, I am!).'' So he plods through his days, making notes and checking references at the British Museum and dealing with a few select literary friends in Hampstead or Spitalfields to keep up on the local gossip and the word from home. Then he meets Maeve Findlater, a leftist activist from Ireland, while she is passing out anti-apartheid leaflets on the street. She introduces him to her brother Derek, a reformed junkie on the dole. Avery is quickly drawn into a kind of emotional alliance with the two, a bond of desperation mixed with anger that awakens many of the feelings he's tried to suppress--especially when he and Derek find themselves falling in love. The fear of loss that Avery carries within him, though, suddenly becomes cruelly literal when Maeve and Derek become embroiled in violence during a mysterious trip to Ireland. In the end, Avery has to return to the life that he's left behind and discovers that he can, in fact, go home again. A work so beautifully constructed that one wants to overlook its rambling narrative, hackneyed plot, and two-dimensional people. Impressive in parts, but finally unpersuasive. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This first novel by poet/essayist Corn (Autobiographies, LJ 11/1/92) illustrates both the pluses and minuses of a poet's approach to fiction?it offers beautiful language but too often bogs down in excessive description. Playwright Avery Walsh has moved to London to recover from his lover's recent death from AIDS away from his circle of friends. "If loneliness was going to be it, then why not double or nothing?" Though he is motivated by a desire for solitude, Avery soon becomes involved in the lives of two Irish ex-pats?Maeve and her brother, Derek, a young Adonis with spiked, peroxide-blond hair?and of a woman named Corinne from back home. What happens to Derek and Maeve on a visit to Ireland changes Avery's life, but, unfortunately, most of this action occurs offstage. Still, the emotive quality of the story grabs the reader's interest, and Corn has captured the uncertainty of gay romance in the 1990s and the real pain of losing someone you love. What is best here are the netted truths about the human condition. Recommended as demand warrants.?Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, Ind.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.