Lit Reviews

Born on the Fourth of July
By Ron Kovic.
Akashic Books, 218 pages, $14.95 (paper).

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Tolstoy told us at the outset of Anna Karenina, but wars are not families, and as Ron Kovic's recently reissued Vietnam memoir Born on the Fourth of July demonstrates, unhappy wars – and is there any other kind? – do tend to be strikingly similar in their human particulars. The book, first published in 1976, became a Tom Cruise movie in 1989, and to reread it now is to be struck by an unaffected narrative power that has nothing to do with an actor's polished teeth or a multimillion-dollar marketing budget and everything to do with the basic truths of war: fear, confusion, body parts, misery, stink, death.

Kovic (who lives today in southern California) emerged from the war in a wheelchair, having been permanently paralyzed by a bullet through the spinal cord in 1967 at age 21. The book gives a graphic account of the labors required to maintain a high-level paraplegic body, and impotence is a recurrent theme: a young man's elegy for lost carnal pleasures and the human connections that can grow from them. The very flat-footedness of these passages intensifies their effect and makes them more difficult to read, though for sheer horror they cannot compete with Kovic's unvarnished descriptions of battlefield carnage, of fellow soldiers with heads shot through or severed, and of a friend's lifeless blue eyes staring into the daytime sky.

The book's reappearance is not casually timed. Kovic is a bitter critic of the Iraq war, which he calls "immoral and illegal" in his new introduction, and he sees himself as having been "given the task ... in a nation that often still seems to believe in war and the use of violence as a solution to its problems ... of lighting a lantern, ringing a bell, shouting from the highest rooftops, warning the American people and citizens everywhere of the deep immorality and utter wrongness of this approach ... pleading for an alternative to this chaos and madness, this insanity and brutality." Amen. (Paul Reidinger)

Song of the Loon
By Richard Amory.
Arsenal Pulp Press, 176 pages, $15.95 (paper).

First published in 1966, Richard Amory's newly reissued Song of the Loon is a maverick novel whose impact on gay life stretches from any gay porn shot in the woods to the birth of gay liberation. Certainly the queens who rioted at New York City's Stonewall Inn in the summer of 1969 would have been more likely to have a copy of Song of the Loon near their bedside than Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, not just because of Loon's unabashedly gay erotic content but also because the hero of the story discovers, by giving in to his sexual desires, a personal euphoria rather than the moral hand of judgment and tragedy so common in the gay pulps that came before it. It is a gay utopia.

Amory wrote Song of the Loon while pursuing a master's degree at San Francisco State University, and the influence of 16-century Spanish pastoral novels on the book is immense. Loon is a bucolic tale set in the mythical world of fur trappers and Native Americans in the frontier forests of Oregon in the second half of the 19th century. Poetically distant from reality, it tells the story of Ephraim MacIver, a man who flees upriver through the dense forest of the Pacific Northwest to escape a violent, self-loathing former lover. His journey leads him to several Native Americans, who show him how to mature into a self-accepting gay man capable of loving relationships.

The novel is virtually plotless, and the erotic passages are quite tame by today's standards. What remains revolutionary is the notion that intense and affectionate sex can be shared with many men without detracting from the relationship with the man you have chosen as your partner. In an age of gay marriage, the message that enforced monogamy is slavery remains remarkably refreshing. Any gay man who beats himself up for sleeping around on his partner should read this 40-year-old gay classic.

The Arsenal Pulp Press edition of Song of the Loon restores several bawdy poems cut from the initial Green Leaf Classics edition, along with appendices culled from several interviews Amory gave to gay magazines in 1970. His laceration of famous "closet queen" authors is just one of the juicy highlights found in these six appendices. (Troy Gaspard)

The Other Side of the Postcard
Edited by devorah major.
City Lights, 154 pages, $14.95 (paper).

In The Other Side of the Postcard, former San Francisco poet laureate devorah major has gathered the work of current and former San Francisco poets, including children and adults, both of the "street" and those more conventionally housed, into an anthology whose purpose is to honor scenes not famous enough or, especially, too unpleasant for tourist viewing, and so to balance the city's picture-perfect image. She reveals her motivation in an introduction that, sadly, might be deemed the collection's best "poem." On "one of those San Francisco postcard days" when "the sky was a tasty azure blue," major drove past happily playing children to visit a friend whose garden was heavenly with "birds of paradise, exotic cacti, oregano, and rosemary." But the day was marred by a somber distraction: a street memorial to "a recent casualty of the street wars." Major ultimately happened upon five street altars in one day. She vowed then to create her own poetic memorial.

The poems strive for verbal originality and persuasive evocation, but what often emerges are polemical expressions of rage and despair. Major's "breathe" urges mindfulness in the face of violence, interspersing exhortations to "breath in" and "breathe out" among images like: "blood runs down / a beaten woman's face / as a man is beginning / to come inside her / torn vagina." Leonard Irving itemizes sordidness in "Tenderloin Poem": "Drunk cripples. / ... dispirited addicts. / Filthy. Stealthy. / Racism and rape...." Alternatively, Susan Sibbet reminds us that "what we know, perhaps what matters, / is wild orange and bright acacia in spring, / small folded bloom ... / ... sweet gum in summer, / and the slow winter rains." These are poems of witness, but their snapshots are more familiar and less shocking than the authors seem to realize. The Other Side of the Postcard lacks the complexity and ambiguity its subjects demand, but its laudable intentions and rough gems will appeal to many among the already converted. (Alexandra Yurkovsky)

The People of Paper
By Salvador Plascencia.
McSweeney's, 200 pages, $20.

In Salvador Plascencia's first novel, The People of Paper, each page drums home a series of constant assaults in a "war against omniscient narration." Text is divided into columns, printed sideways, and interspersed with diagrams, inkblots, and cutouts. The novel, it emerges early on, is about another war too, "a war against the future of this story." The columns of narration represent the diverse perspectives of the novel's characters, and no single voice reigns supreme throughout. One of Plascencia's narrators, Saturn, is an autobiographical persona who both manipulates and is manipulated by his protagonists. Elsewhere, apparently unrelated figures emerge as variants of one another, each affected with sadness in their search for love. And halfway through we learn that Saturn's a liar. Cameroon, another narrator, has compiled a list of his lies, 64 pages in all, and as we recognize them, we might wonder how much else has fooled us so far, and then if it matters.

The People of Paper is also an extraordinary geography that starts with the reshaping of its pages and moves on to the landscapes of Mexico, from Jalisco and Tijuana to southern California and the border between them. Plascencia's narrators link places to the bodies of the people who live and travel through them. The mother of Baby Nostradamus tells Little Merced's fortune by looking into the geography of her past: "As she traced my lifeline, the blister on the tip of her finger ruptured, and the fluid channeled into the ruts of my hand. The outer lines of my palm became tributaries feeding into the main river. I lifted my hand and saw that I was holding the river of Las Tortugas." The scars on a woman who burns herself with the star-shaped tip of a Phillips head screwdriver can be read like the sky – Little Merced sees "logic in the placements and ... other constellations still forming."

A sense of the fantastic hovers over every episode in the book, but at the same time the story is grounded in an utterly real, even literal, interpretation of the world. Here, Tinseltown is tinsel, and the people of La Quemadora burn their bodies to burn away their sorrows. As Saturn's grip loosens on the story, Smiley (yet another narrator) can pick away at the sky to reveal the narrator behind it: "I raised my hand, feeling for a rough spot. Once I found it, I began peeling at the deteriorating glaze of blue, collapsing part of the sky.... I grabbed at the edges of the hole and pulled myself into the house of Saturn." This narrator, it turns out, can't escape the world he's created, and by the end of the novel, his story musters the strength to conclude without his help, "leaving no footprints that Saturn could track." (Brigid Gaffikin)