Dirty-Root-Hairs-Raw

JüKTica Killian continuedfrom previous page go down smooth. The prose tries to evade attention, pretending to be serviceable only. Ittakes $150 worth ofattention to see it's really a sort of poetry masquerading as something younger, more commercial. Martin made my ears prick up a few years back with his debut novel. Outline ofMy Lover, its title and indeed its shape that of a long-lost Marguerite Duras screenplay, was published by Soft Skull in spring 2000. It was a text so murky you couldn't see through it. Put your finger up to the sentences, and they would dissolve under your touch. I admire a writer with the courage of his convictions, even if he's doing something dumb; and whatever it was, precious perhaps, Outline ofMy Lover wasn't dumb. Curiosity seekers and fans of National Enquirer dove into this book in droves, for it was publicized as a roman à clef about Martin's real life love affair with a closeted pop star. I wonder what those shallow curiosity seekers made out of it?—but what am I talking about, I was one of them! Who doesn't want to read about the rich and the famous, or more precisely, about the closeted? Everything else is just gravy, and sometimes the gravy's got lumps in it. "Outline" is today a word with one foot in MFA workshop seminar tables, and the other in CSI forensics, where yellow tape shows you where the body once crumpled itself up. And Martin's writing is most successful as it locates itself within the body. '7 want myselfto be implicated in my texts and to have to answerfor them, to give a reality Ifeel denied." They Change the Subject divides into three sections . The first opens up with "License," a delicately observed tale of young love, as two Southern boys, loath to admit a mutual attraction, let themselves be picked up by a shadowy motorist who, absolutely without politesse, acts quickly on the responses his charges engender in each other. The boy who doesn't get off emerges as our narrator, glancing at the rearview mirror into the steamy back seat. He's always the last one to be loved, the first to be forgotten. He doesn't even earn a name, though he will later adopt trick names, like "Bobby" or "Woody." It's a brilliant characterization, and our sympathies are with him throughout his youth, especially in the longish tale, "A Model Love." In it, our boy answers an ad for models placed by a straight painter on whom, as the weeks pass in a rustic studio, he develops a crazy crush made all the more vulnerable by his ongoing nudity. Is abjection a prerequisite for art? If not, how else can we bring it into the world without hurting our selves? Another early story ends with a frisson of broken boundaries: "I hold the heart hole-punch in one of my hands, waiting for the next customer. I place the heart hole-punch around my lower lip, just fit it there, and am surprised that I can get it around." Well, of course he winds up with a heart-shaped dent in his mouth—"just enough to break the skin." PartTwo is called "OutTakes," and yes, it seems like, they're pretty much out-takes from the novel about the pop star. In Part Three, our hero goes right off the deep end, having lost the big love of his life, and he walks through the gauntlet of escort service, where every humiliation stings all the more because, once, he had a love worth whispering about. Every erection brings its own Gethsemane. In different ways, Martin's fiction repeatedly poses the same question: what's in and what's out? In the essay he wrote for the recent anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Martin has theorized a response out of the K-hole of identity: I'm interested in how the daily periodically builds to this breaking point, what one needs to be interested in going on to continue, how much lack one can take in one life, before one begins looking for the...