Now It's Time to Say Goodbye

Two gay men abandon New York City for a poor, racially polarized village in Kansas, where a cast of characters--including a gay Black prostitute, a hermitic white artist, and a budding scholar--responds to a girl's kidnapping and rape

As soulless as a rock video and as decadently frenetic as a windup action pimp ... [Dale Peck] may not have written this year's worst book. But if there's anything out there that can top this, I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Though it's not a fully successful novel, this fascinating melodrama of sexual and racial confusion, conflict, and injustice is both a bold departure from and a logical outgrowth of the brooding studies of gay angst (Martin and John, 1993; The Law of Enclosures, 1996) that established Peck as one of our most interesting younger writers. Thematic and other echoes of the earlier books resound throughout this big novel, which relates through a large chorus of townspeople's voices the explosive occurrences after writer Colin Nieman and his lover ``Justin Time'' flee AIDS-polluted New York for a rural Kansas town that's effectively divided into white and black subsections, Galatea and Galatia. The pair's interrelations with numerous bruised and guilty souls--a black hustler named Divine, a woman ``archivist'' obsessed with unearthing her town's secrets, and a wealthy matriarch who may have ordered a murder are prominent among them--reveal a dauntingly intricate heritage of violence: the lynching of a black teenager falsely accused of ``touching'' a young girl, the real crime that underlay the town's mania for ``justice.'' The ambiguities in both of the novels Colin has written (and will write) and of the very one we're reading are--a bit affectedly--linked to that mystery. More persuasively, the infectious momentum here powerfully dramatizes what its characters call ``humanity's need to reveal itself through written confession'' and the truth that ``most people have only one secret, and that secret is whom they truly love.'' Peck incorporates his story's grand mal particulars into a surprisingly tightly plotted narrative, weakened but not quite sunk by its penchant for excess (the resolution of that lynching victim's story is both overwrought and opaque). And to its benefit and detriment (in almost equal measure), this very literary fiction is derivative, to varying degrees, of James Purdy, James Leo Herlihy, Erskine Caldwell, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. A rich, readable, frustrating mulligan stew of a novel. Peck has upped the ante impressively. After Kansas, one wonders where he'll take us next. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Galatia/Galatea, a small Kansas town, divided by different spellings, different races, and vastly different perspectives on life, is the scene of rape, murder, and general mayhem as its residents struggle in a microcosm with all the ills of the outside world within its fairly isolated borders. Outsiders, a gay white couple from New York, seek refuge in the town from the stalking death of AIDS, only to become engulfed in the backwash of a long-ago wrong--the lynching of an albino black man, falsely accused of raping a young white girl. The newcomers, writer Colin Nieman and his lover Justin Time, magnify the harsh contrasts of the town---artistic sensibilities versus the mundane, gays and straights, men and women, whites and blacks, the powerful and the powerless. The pair brings with them a conceit that their complicated lives of wealth, betrayal, and cruelty are beyond the comprehension of the rural town, only to discover lives far more complex and violent than their own. The town's resident artist Wade Painting and his black lover Divine serve as counterpoints to Colin and Justin, setting off a quadrangle of artistic and sexual jealousy. Have the outsiders somehow upset the delicate balance of the town and triggered unspeakable violence, or has the town's own past come back to haunt it? The broader conflict is between white powers-that-be, struggling to keep dark secrets hidden and progress moving ahead in a dying town, and the black bastion of power, quietly exacting revenge and keeping the outside world and its threats of racial tension at bay. Peck's novel is a compelling thriller with subtle and informed knowledge of race relations in the U.S. Vanessa Bush