Scissors, Paper, Rock

Raphael Hardin, a young gay man, returns home to visit his dying father--who disapproves of his son's lifestyle but is unaware that his son may be dying as well--in an attempt to reconcile before it is too late.

Johnson follows Crossing the River with a wise and compassionate novel. Eleven episodes explore the history of the Hardin family of Strang Knob, Ky., a fading community hidden away in the Appalachians. At the thematic center is 36-year-old Raphael, youngest of the seven Hardin children, who, in the first episode, "High Bridge," has come home from San Francisco to visit his dying father Tom and is himself dying of AIDS. This beautifully realized story paints an elegiac but unflinching portrait of a gay son's alienation from his harsh parent, even in the face of death. Other sections weave through time to flesh out complex family and community relationships, at the same time establishing the obsolescence of the Hardins' traditional ways. The philosophical voices of Raphael and Miss Camilla Perkins, a spinster schoolteacher who has spent decades on the periphery of the Hardin clan, shape this collage of family life and loss into an affecting whole, even though other narrators are not as striking. In the lesser pantheon of Hardin storytellers are Joe Ray, Raphael's alcoholic brother who learns to live with guilt after causing the car accident that injures his son; Elizabeth, the sister who fulfills her mother's dreams of moving to California, only to experience loneliness and failure; and Clark, the son meant to continue Tom's legacy in the community, but who dies in Vietnam. Johnson movingly conveys the senselessness of death, the inevitability of loss and the failure of families to shield us from either.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A tender, haunting account of a rural southern family's demise as the parents sicken and die, the gay son contracts AIDS, and other siblings leave for greener urban pastures. Written in stories, each one dated, Johnson's second novel (Crossing the River, 1989) manages to be both intimate and panoramic. Raphael, 36, is the gay son of Tom and Rose Ella Hardin, but the point of view here moves easily from family member to family member--including sister Elizabeth, who near the end collects Raphael's ashes in 1990, and next-door neighbor Miss Camille Perkins, a fount of common wisdom. The story, set in the west Appalachian town of Strang Knob, begins with Tom working wood and musing on his wife's death and his own cancer, which is killing him: he ``has lost the will to ward off the voices and visions.'' Meanwhile, Raphael, the youngest of seven, muses at various places throughout about his long coming-out process, which turned him into ``a human being instead of a rock.'' Son Clark dies in 1970 in Vietnam in the chapter story ``All Fall Down.'' In ``Little Deaths,'' set in 1942, Tom in Rose Ella's presence saves a dog from drowning in a flooded river, thereby sealing the unbreakable bond between them. The book is especially strong in its exploration of the varieties of grief that accompany deaths and losses, though on occasion--as when Raphael in 1972 faces intimations of his sexual orientation in the person of self-described mechanic Willie-- Johnson also displays an antic streak. Thoughtful and poised: a careful family chronicle with a gay twist is brought to a poignant close with a haunting plea--``Who will remember me?'' -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.