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Oct. 6th, 2020 10:10 pmMicah Nemerever's These Violent Delights is a really fantastic entry into the rich genre of homoerotic thrillers about subsuming one's identity into an intense and destructive relationship; it's also, very relevantly to me, not only an extremely queer book but an extremely Jewish book, with a deep undercurrent of diaspora culture and generational trauma running through the text.
The plot: it's the 1970s in Pittsburgh, and seventeen-year-old Paul Fleischer's working-class Jewish family is still in mourning for his father -- a weight of stifling emotion that Paul desperately wants to escape. Then Paul meets college classmate Julian Fromme, brilliant and vicious and wriggling furiously on the hook of his very different family's very different expectations for him. Pretty soon, the two of them are inseparable, which is where the hard part begins, but not, of course, where it ends.
Julian and Paul's mutual obsession makes both their families very uncomfortable, for some bad reasons (it is the 1970s and everyone Knows what is going on but they do NOT want to say it), but also some very good ones! These bright and disaffected kids are eventually going to do a murder and it's going to be bad; the book tells you this at the beginning. It's not a secret. The book is about how we get there, and how Paul and Julian transform each other along the way, in large part by staring deeply into each other's eyes and trying really hard to become the person they think they see in the reflection without stopping to check their perceptions against reality.
And a major element of that self-idealization -- for Paul, at least, our POV character for almost all of the book -- is the struggle to be better than the world in which he finds himself: a world just one generation past the Holocaust, a world of Nietzsche and My Lai and the Milgram Experiment, in which it seems impossible to believe that any human being doesn't carry the seeds of, not just evil, but banal evil inside of them. This book has been pretty frequently compared to The Secret History, and for good reason, but the thing that sets this apart from that, for me, is the specificity of the place and time and circumstances that shape Paul and Julian into what they become. The Secret History is a brilliant book, but I absolutely could not tell you in what decade it takes place; I genuinely think it changes scene to scene. Richard's family doesn't matter, Henry's background doesn't matter, what matters is the all-consuming environment of the college and the claustrophobia of the relations among the kids. In These Violent Delights, on the other hand, it matters tremendously that Paul's grandparents were socialists, that Julian's father conceals his Jewishness, that Paul's mother and sisters are slowly working their way out of grief even as Paul is twisting further and further inwards.
I don't want to say, like, 'if you like gay books with murder, give this a go,'although it is absolutely a gay book with murder, because I feel like that gives an impression of lightness that's a little misleading. But if you like thoughtful and extremely well-done character/relationship studies with some gay murder in them, and up for feeling a lingering sense of uncomfortably haunted claustrophobia long after the close of the book, I would strongly recommend.
The plot: it's the 1970s in Pittsburgh, and seventeen-year-old Paul Fleischer's working-class Jewish family is still in mourning for his father -- a weight of stifling emotion that Paul desperately wants to escape. Then Paul meets college classmate Julian Fromme, brilliant and vicious and wriggling furiously on the hook of his very different family's very different expectations for him. Pretty soon, the two of them are inseparable, which is where the hard part begins, but not, of course, where it ends.
Julian and Paul's mutual obsession makes both their families very uncomfortable, for some bad reasons (it is the 1970s and everyone Knows what is going on but they do NOT want to say it), but also some very good ones! These bright and disaffected kids are eventually going to do a murder and it's going to be bad; the book tells you this at the beginning. It's not a secret. The book is about how we get there, and how Paul and Julian transform each other along the way, in large part by staring deeply into each other's eyes and trying really hard to become the person they think they see in the reflection without stopping to check their perceptions against reality.
And a major element of that self-idealization -- for Paul, at least, our POV character for almost all of the book -- is the struggle to be better than the world in which he finds himself: a world just one generation past the Holocaust, a world of Nietzsche and My Lai and the Milgram Experiment, in which it seems impossible to believe that any human being doesn't carry the seeds of, not just evil, but banal evil inside of them. This book has been pretty frequently compared to The Secret History, and for good reason, but the thing that sets this apart from that, for me, is the specificity of the place and time and circumstances that shape Paul and Julian into what they become. The Secret History is a brilliant book, but I absolutely could not tell you in what decade it takes place; I genuinely think it changes scene to scene. Richard's family doesn't matter, Henry's background doesn't matter, what matters is the all-consuming environment of the college and the claustrophobia of the relations among the kids. In These Violent Delights, on the other hand, it matters tremendously that Paul's grandparents were socialists, that Julian's father conceals his Jewishness, that Paul's mother and sisters are slowly working their way out of grief even as Paul is twisting further and further inwards.
I don't want to say, like, 'if you like gay books with murder, give this a go,'although it is absolutely a gay book with murder, because I feel like that gives an impression of lightness that's a little misleading. But if you like thoughtful and extremely well-done character/relationship studies with some gay murder in them, and up for feeling a lingering sense of uncomfortably haunted claustrophobia long after the close of the book, I would strongly recommend.
