GLR July-August 2023

lent of White showing off old baubles that remind him of past times. After August brings back a particularly loud top one evening, Aldwych makes the excuse to his complaining down stairs neighbor that they were stacking books all night, a story that he’s told before in both MyLives and A Farewell Symphony . There are repeated stories from White’s previous works about the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan overcharging patients, and of lusty adolescent Venetian speedboat operators. At one point, Aldwych, alone and melancholy in a Biarritz hotel suite, remi nisces about his lost loves: “Stan, Troy, Giuseppe, Keith and Jim Ruddy.” All of these men White has written about previ ously—just not in The Humble Lover. They are never mentioned again in the text. White has always been brilliant at mingling the explicit— sex, scatology, domination, and subjection—with the romantic. There’s nothing wrong with covering the same thematic ground again and again—all writers do it—but one looks for a differ ent view of humanity to shine through with each new iteration. The novel’s villain, Ernestine, is the rich wife of Aldwych’s

housemate; Kahlila becomes his therapist, his mischievous playmate, and the loving friend who finally pushes him out of hid ing to try to rejoin the world. Eventually, after dangerous false starts, Wassim begins, little by little, to make a life for himself with the kindness of a shop owner. While traumatized by being branded less than a man by his country due to the shame he has brought to his fam ily, Wassim remains decidedly unwilling to leave Syria. Hussam, on the other hand, responds to his situation by joining the anti-Assad protests. He is arrested and later escapes to Turkey, then moves to Vancouver with the help of an older white man, a controlling boyfriend and sponsor. In Canada, Hussam faces daily agonies for which he has no name. Ghoul ish visions of his dead father appear whenever a man finds Hussam attractive, as well as before, during, and after he has sex. Hussam’s path to self-destruction is charted by substance abuse and random hookups, which the reader witnesses in vivid detail. This is a love story that collapses in on itself before it be gins. The lovers are isolated with little to no hope of reintegra tion, both of them miserable as they continue to be menaced by the horrors of their past. Ramadan persuasively interlocks their narratives as the story jarringly swings back and forth be tween Damascus and Vancouver, each city a distinct kind of hell, each man suffering alone. What the reader knows but the characters can’t see is that, even though they’re physically apart, each remains the most present and consuming person in the other’s life. Hussam and Wassim’s incorrect assumptions about what the past means to the other, and how or what the other is think ing and feeling, are some of the most painful aspects of their deeply troubled relationship. But there are even darker secrets For all that, there are still brilliant moments in this novel. There’s a passage in which we learn that Aldwych loved to dance as a young man, but only secretly when his father would leave the house. As White describes it: “he took his cue from the music, which he knew by heart. He would stand on his toes, lie briefly and lightly on his back on the sofa, fluttering his legs in entrechats in the air ... cling to the back of a chair in order to ex tend his right leg far, far behind him without losing his balance. He felt so free, so exalted, so pagan as he spun, crouched, leapt, imagining that his bluish-white body was exciting the imagined adult male observer in the shadows.” It is here, in the gilded re membrance of his alter ego, that White takes flight—free, shim mering, and seen by us all. nephew. She’s a sexual sadist who wants to steal August away from Aldwych and turn him into her own slave. There are only quick feints to a deeper background or understanding of who she is. August similarly remains, at least until the last third of the novel, somewhat of a cipher, perhaps befitting his role as its objet d’ass .

Omnia Vincit Amor

T HE FOGHORN ECHOES is an eloquent novel of physical and emotional displacement told pri marily by two narrators whose de moralized voices chronicle survival as gay Muslim Arabs on opposite sides of the globe. Syrian-Canadian author Danny Ra madan begins the novel in 2003, when the

T HOMAS K EITH

THE FOGHORN ECHOES by Danny Ramadan Canongate Books. 288 pages. $26.

American war in Iraq is rattling the Middle East. Amid the tur moil, two adolescent friends, Hussam and Wassim, begin to rec ognize their attraction for one another. After Hussam’s father catches them in an embrace, Wassim, in a moment of blind panic, accidently causes the death of his friend’s father. Several years later, the Syrian War is raging and the young men are liv ing with Wassim’s family when Wassim’s father catches them together, this time in a loving moment of post-coital bliss. En raged, he banishes Hussam and forces Wassim into an arranged marriage. From there, their paths diverge. Eventually Wassim aban dons his wife and child and shelters in a bombed-out Damas cus building while he looks for Hussam. Starving, filthy, and frightened, he is unwilling to live the lie he was assigned by his family, religion, and culture. Unable to forgive himself, the separation from Hussam is intolerable. It is months before a glimmer of relief comes, albeit in the form of a ghost. A woman who was murdered by her husband for her inability to bear chil dren, Kahlila now lives an ectoplasmic life in what was previ ously her family home, and decides to gradually appear to Wassim. Kahlila is tenderly drawn, even when her dialog occasion ally strays into greeting-card affirmation. She’s more than his Thomas Keith’s writing has appeared in American Theatre , TheDrouth , and Studies in Scottish Literature . 38

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