Prime

By Poppy Z. Brite. Three Rivers Press, 283 pages, $13.95 (paper).

In deliriously addictive prose, Poppy Z. Brite constructs an addictive story in Prime, a quasi-mystery romp through the world of haute cuisine in New Orleans. A kind of culinary Devil Wears Prada, only faster paced and more clever than spiteful, the story follows two young chefs, G-man and Rickey — working-class but not scruffy; gay but not, you know, big city gay — after opening their first restaurant, Liquor, in which all the dishes are made with liquor. Prime starts with a negative restaurant review that dwells more on the chefs' personalities than on the food served, which, as Rickey and G-man find, leads into a maze of questions and questionable political deals. The plot is mostly window dressing, letting the real symphony of this book shine through: the food. Brite fills entire pages with luscious, delicate descriptions of steak tastings, as in Rickey's first visit to a Dallas steak house:

First was the beef taste he knew, deeper than usual but still familiar. Following that was an almost cheesy flavor — not unpleasant, but rather like a good Parmigiano-Reggiano when it started to get old and grainy. He'd eaten beef thousands of times, yet this was like the first time he had tasted foie gras or the sharp, briny oysters of the Pacific Northwest, so different from the sweet, fat Gulf oysters he'd grown up eating.

Entangled with the food relationships are the personal relationships, and the corruption-by-numbers plot allows Brite to put Rickey and G-man's relationship through drama and withering. They're gay, and it's not subtle, but neither is it overstated in that hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-frying-pan way mainstream TV is so fond of these days. Since her early vampire novels, Brite has dealt with out-of-the-box sexualities. Back then it meant the polyamorous undead. Now it means a queer couple doing life partnership the old-fashioned way. Like the food itself, Brite takes her characters and plot out of the box, fleshes them out, and makes them shine — and it makes one hell of a good novel. (Matthue Roth)

Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men

By Peggy F. Drexler with Linden Gross. Rodale, 240 pages, $23.95.

Peggy F. Drexler's Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men redefines ”familyÓ to reach beyond the heterosexual, nuclear partnership, along the way crushing such old chestnuts as the idea that, historically, most families were in the Cleaver mold. The book is rich in anecdotal accounts of the benefits to boys of being raised in two-mother, lesbian families and by ”single mothers by choice,Ó and it is sprinkled with references to studies that point to the same conclusions. Drexler demonstrates how boys raised by ”maverick momsÓ often express great emotional honesty and have a more developed sense of social responsibility; she credits this to a mothering style that rejects ”authoritarian parentingÓ in favor of open dialogue between family members. In fact, any difficulties these boys might experience from being raised without a live-in father are often shared by other boys too. Boys living with fathers who are often physically or emotionally absent experience ”father hungerÓ just as some of the boys Drexler studied do. But to counter this, some of these boys actively seek out positive male role models and incorporate them into their extended ”collected families.Ó

At times Raising Boys is frustrating to read. Despite a caveat early in the book that the families she interviews are predominantly white and relatively wealthy, Drexler turns only occasionally to the roles class, privilege, and culture might play in determining how these mothers raise their boys — or what these factors might mean for how these families define masculinity. And while the book is written in accessible prose, Drexler sometimes seems to struggle to retain the complexity of her academic findings in the conversational tone. As a consequence the argument is sometimes muddled. This matters because the book occasionally ends up sending mixed messages about the very stereotypes it wants to challenge. When Drexler remarks that the boys in her study ”were not sissies or mama's boysÓ and when some of the mothers interviewed express concerns that their boys have ”feminineÓ hobbies — one frets about her son's interest in cooking — I wondered if Drexler's message to the anxious straight world that hey, look, lesbian mothers aren't so bad after all was also undergirded by a concern in the (hetero-normative) culture that these families might raise gay sons. Overall, however, this is not the message that predominates. ”Gender is not a tidy way of organizing what we know about human beings,Ó Drexler notes, adding that narrow cultural norms of masculinity can be stifling and, worse, emotionally deadening for young boys. Ultimately, she finds, boys living in families with ”maverick moms ” end up becoming better equipped than many to understand how to challenge these narrow social norms. (Brigid Gaffikin)

Oh the Glory of It All

By Sean Wilsey. Penguin Press, 482 pages, $25.95.

San Francisco is many parallel cities, but if you're like me, the weirdest one to spot is that stratum whose money is ”old ” (at least older than the dot-com variety) and whose major nonfiscal function is encapsulated by that odd term socialite. These stuffed birds — paunchy or skeletal depending on gender, expensively yet often grotesquely turned out, facial lines ever more startled with age — exist in a gilded self-containment that theoretically is the American dream's ultimate destination. But they usually look so smug, dumb, nervous, peeved, unhealthy, and/or unhappy, not to mention so utterly uncool, that one feels more queasy than envious. Rare close encounters between prole and swell at, say, an Opera House urinal bank invariably result in the sort of politely disdainful noncommunication that might ensue between a common workaday pigeon and a fabulous, inbred, vaguely doomed dodo.

Semiproof that these folk really are as exotic and inscrutable as one suspects is offered in Oh the Glory of It All, Sean Wilsey's memoir of growing up as a black sheep in a family otherwise colored pecuniary green and blood blue. Many a national fluff piece has been penned about the book's ”scandalous exposŽ ” of SF glitterati and how it has rocked their world — not in a good, Huey-Lewis-played-my-debutante-ball way, either.

As the only child (not counting various half-sibs) to flamboyant butter magnate Al Wilsey and his way-more-so wife, Pat Montandon, Sean's troubles began at age nine, when his parents' marriage (the third for both) suddenly hit ze rocks. Dad left a wildly embittered Mom for Dede Traina, an East Coast princess who usurped not only her ”good friendsÓ's husband but her status as the number-one West Coast hostess too.

Dede had carefully wooed Sean with candy and confidential chats as well. But once the deal was done, her demeanor turned to ice, while Dad simply went with the flow and ignored Junior in favor of Dede's own two ”perfect ” sons. Meanwhile, mom Pat fell theatrically apart — at one point insisting Sean sign on to a dual suicide pact — before finding even more histrionic salvation as the dotty doyen of a ”Children for Peace ” road show that arm-twisted endorsements from the pope and Indira Gandhi.

Constantly told he was a failure, Sean did his best to obey, skateboarding downward from one boarding school for privileged young fuckups to another. He eventually got his head together, albeit without much help from Mom, Dad, or Evil Stepmom.

Were these adults really as demanding, unreasonable, and remote as the author recalls? Still channeling an adolescent's bottomless bewilderment, he's perhaps not the most reliable judge. Yet Glory's credibility is boosted by its lack of whining. Wilsey regards his own hapless behavior with hindsight humor, his parents' with a certain horror but little remaining rancor. Maybe people this driven, acquisitive, and spotlight-hungry simply lack the empathy gene, even toward their own children.

Surprisingly flavorful and well written, Oh the Glory of It All (lame title, though) transcends the juicy lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-neurotic tell-all you might expect — in part because its author never quite seems comfortable in the milieu he was born into. Now, like all good first-book memoirists, Wilsey must prove he can write equally well about something other than himself. (Dennis Harvey)

Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops

By Robert J.S. Ross. University of Michigan Press, 408 pages, $19.95 (paper).

American garment-worker history, economic analysis of the international clothing industry, and sociology of the global justice movement: Robert J.S. Ross has rolled them all into one book, Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops. That the anti-sweatshop movement's corporate targets are American is well-known; the movement has confronted stores like the Gap, labels like Guess?, and celebrities like Kathie Lee Gifford as publicly as possible with the facts of working life in the mostly third world factories that produce the garments that bear their labels. The book's estimate that more than a quarter of a million of the ”new sweatshopÓ workers are here in the United States may surprise some readers. But Ross, a sociology professor and activist, operates under clear definitions of sweatshop, and one that covers more than a third of the American sewing shops is ”a place where workers are paid below the local minimum wage. ”

The real surprise, then, is not that American garment workers don't make much money — our minimum wage is generally recognized as a poverty wage — but that American labor-law enforcement is so ineffectual that even this low standard is so widely violated. But as Ross explains, the replacement of actual labor-law enforcement with a system of garment-industry self-monitoring goes back to the Clinton administration, when congressional passage of funding for an adequate number of inspectors was deemed politically unfeasible and this self-policing approach was considered a viable — or at least realistic — alternative. Ross reckons this a key factor, along with increased concentration of power within the industry and a corresponding decline in union power, in the return of the sweatshop to America.

If the elimination of sweatshops is your issue, this is your book. And if it's not your issue, when you learn of Nicaraguan garment workers earning less than 1 percent of the price of the jeans they sew and consider that the US buys 30 percent of the world's imported clothing, and the European Union another 26 percent, you may decide it should be. (Tom Gallagher)

Through the Wall: A Year in Havana

By Margot Eve Pepper. Freedom Voices, 336 pages, $19.95 (paper).

Margot Eve Pepper's memoir, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, captures Cuba during its ”special period ” in 1992, when the most austere economic measures of the island's history were ushered in. Her well-researched, witty, and thought-provoking work takes a hard look at Cuba through the eyes of someone who has lived there, not as a liberal tourist passing through on a two-week visit but as a working member of the community. Pepper takes the reader straight to Cuba ... no frills, no rose-colored glasses.

Pepper, who was granted a yearlong visa to work as a journalist for Cuba's most prestigious newspaper, Granma International, begins her book as one begins a journey: hopeful, excited, and nervous. This is the time that tough economic measures, spurred by the collapse of the Soviet trading bloc, are being put in place and that tougher sanctions are being imposed by the United States.

Born in Mexico as the daughter of a blacklisted Hollywood producer, Pepper writes that she was drawn to Cuba to explore a society founded on the ideals that led to her parents' exile from the US to Mexico. They left to escape persecution for their political beliefs during Sen. Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting. Because she is also a poet, her writing is graceful and lyrical even as she delves into complex economic theory and politically sophisticated analysis. She weaves in the music of the island, the oppressive heat and the balmy winds, the tenderness and beauty of Cuba's people. Pepper takes us into her inner world too, and her conflict and longing for home as the harshness of her situation wears on her: nagging hunger, a cockroach epidemic, perpetually broken elevators, eternal waits for buses that may or may not arrive, electricity- and water-rationing.

Throughout the book a parallel story emerges of love and the painful fallout of alcoholism, as she falls into a marriage with a troubled and sometimes violent but brilliant Mexican poet. She takes us to the moment that Fidel Castro announces the decriminalization of possessing hard currency, ”conceding victory to the mighty dollar,Ó as she puts it, and of the reaction to this unwelcome news. ”No words come. Not from anyone. Just an occasional whimper and sniffing piercing the silence of resignation. What is there to say about the death of Cuba's purest attempt at socialism that Fidel himself hasn't said today?Ó

Through the Wall is ultimately about acceptance and enlightenment. ”Whether the ideals of the Cuban revolution, whether my father's dreams were made manifest in his lifetime or mine are irrelevant, ” she writes. ”What matters is that such ideals have survived, so they may continue evolving. ” (R.M. Arrieta)