GLR November-December 2023

A NNE C HARLES THE SUMMERS: A Novel by Ronya Othmann Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 201 pages, $17.95 R ONYA OTHMANN’S debut novel, The Summers , be gins with a reversal. At the end of the prefatory chapter, the main character, Leyla Hassan, seems to be speaking for the author as she muses: “You always tell a story from its end. ... Even if you start with the beginning.” In this way, Oth mann announces a departure from traditional chronology in sto rytelling, a turn toward a more dreamlike structure. As the writer traces Leyla’s development from childhood to adulthood, the elusive nature of memory emerges as an abiding theme, sug gesting temporal indeterminacy as a key feature of the novel. Leyla shuttles between summers with her father’s Yazidi fam ily in a small village in Syria and winters in Munich in her mother’s native Germany. Leyla’s father explains that the culture of the Yazidis, the Kurdish-speaking religious group to which his family belongs, is marked by its geographical indefinability. He explains that the official name of Syria overlaps with the unoffi cial territory of Kurdistan, a land that has no formal boundaries, and he warns Leyla that the name Kurdistan is unmentionable outside the family. The need for secrecy thus becomes an impor tant early imperative for Leyla. Instead of strict timelines and geographical demarcations, Othmann offers stories from Yazidi myths and legends, litera ture and music, along with accounts of the exploits of a vast array of family members. The first half of the novel focuses on the summers of the title, when Leyla’s grandmother teaches her Yazidi customs and religion and her father regales her with tales of his Yazidi family’s past, sometimes even when they are back James’ book, also called American Scholar , reaches a recep tive audience, yet its launch is accompanied by disappointment. Just as James refused to attend Bill’s funeral, obsessively organ ized by Gregory after Bill’s death from AIDS in 1987, James’ current husband Fran stays away from James’ reading in 2016. A mysterious envelope with James’ name on it, given to him by Gregory’s sister after his death, is a source of suspense until James opens it and learns that Gregory is still capable of surpris ing him from beyond the grave. Like a big, satisfying 19th-century novel, this book about an other book which doesn’t actually exist is full of deft character sketches, vivid descriptions of particular places, and little epipha nies. James’ sex life is parallel to his research: exhilarating in peak moments, but subtly disappointing when intimacy cannot be reached or maintained. American Scholar— the actual novel by Patrick Horrigan, which won Next Generation Indie Book Award for LGBTQ + fiction for 2023—is an honest and endearing look at two contrasting times and places. ____________________________________________________ Jean Roberta is a widely published writer based in Regina, Canada. Yazidi Nation

J EAN R OBERTA A Novel for a Plot

AMERICAN SCHOLAR: A Novel by Patrick E. Horrigan Lethe Press. 250 pages, $20. S TORIES ABOUT gay male scholars in different eras can reveal intriguing contrasts. What did it mean to be a man, an American, a scholar, and a closeted “invert” in the 1920s? What did it mean to join an all-male “Gay Study Group” at Columbia University in the 1980s, when a life of art and ideas could be interrupted at any time by a sexually transmitted virus that destroyed the body’s ability to protect itself? Has the current legal status of same-sex marriage allowed gay men to join the cultural mainstream in the 21st century? In Patrick E. Horrigan’s American Scholar , questions are raised and addressed in a narrative about James Fitzgerald, called “Jimmy” in his youth. The reader first meets him in 2016, when he is unwilling to dispose of twelve storage boxes that contain “all that is left” of the life he had with Gregory in the 1980s. Like many middle-class heterosexual couples, James and his current husband are in conflict about whether to bring a child into their lives, even though they could afford it. Like the author, James seems introspective, genteel, academic, and literary. His life just before Trump is elected is undoubtedly privileged, yet he carries scars from the past. In a chapter set in 1987, we meet the lively group of gay male students at Columbia University that became Jimmy’s chosen family. He has one foot in the real world of 1980s urban Ameri can culture and the other in the philosophical, closeted world of F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950), a scholar in an earlier era who ex plored the work of 19th-century American authors Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman in a study published in 1941. Jimmy is writing a Ph.D. thesis on Matthiesen, which means that he is tackling, secondhand, a literary world in which Americans were still searching for a national identity. More ex citing for Jimmy is Matthiesen’s relationship with his long-term companion Russell Cheney, who apparently inspired him. Jimmy’s life as a graduate student is vividly relatable. Both the tedium of spending hours reading about dead men and the ex citement of finding unexpected treasure are convincingly de scribed. When not reading and taking notes, Jimmy strikes up a tentative connection with Gregory, who cofounded the study group with Bill but who now seems to be single. Subsequent chapters alternate between 2016 and 1987. It is Gregory who renames Jimmy as “James,” and it sticks. James learns about popular music and cooking from Gregory, whose knowledge is impressive but whose behavior can be extreme. Gregory warns James that he has bipolar disorder and is subject to suicidal depression, and James is moved by his honesty. Like anyone, James has no way of predicting what a relationship with a mentally ill partner will be like. He learns, painfully, that every human consciousness is an island, and there are some places where he cannot follow his lover, his friends, or his role models.

November–December 2023

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