Blackouts

May 1, 2023

In Torres's follow-up to the VCU Cabell--winning We the Animals, the protagonist tends a dying man in the desert who will pass along to him a project comprising stories collected in the early 20th century from queer subjects. Inspired by an actual artifact, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns; with a 100,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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August 7, 2023
Torres’s ambitious sophomore outing (following We the Animals) intersperses a fictional biography of early 20th-century sex researcher Jan Gay with an enticing if murky present-day narrative. The unnamed 20-something narrator visits a dying man named Juan, whom he first met at 17, when they were patients at a psychiatric hospital. Now, after having accidentally flooded his apartment, the narrator moves into Juan’s rundown building (inhabited, in Juan’s words, by a “badling of queer ducks”) and promises to carry out Juan’s unfinished project involving a research study published in 1941—Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns by George W. Henry—that draws on Gay’s research. Juan’s copy of the book is heavily redacted, leaving “little poems of illumination... a counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr. Henry’s agenda,” to de-pathologize Henry’s case studies and restore the egalitarian spirit of Gay’s groundwork. Juan and the narrator’s dialogues can feel contrived, but just as the Sex Variants erasure poems sparkle with possibility, so too does Torres make fruitful use of references to literature and art, including a Carl Van Vechten photo of a famous gay male ballet dancer and a children’s book by Gay’s partner Zhenya, the latter of which proves to contain deliciously queer subtext. At its best, this captures the spirit of Torres’s pangs of inspiration. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

September 1, 2023
An unnamed narrator and his elderly interlocutor weave together forgotten queer histories in Torres' second novel, following We the Animals (2011). When the 20-something narrator wakes up from a blackout to find his kitchen flooded, he drives into the desert to visit Juan, an elderly friend who lives with "a badling of queer ducks" in a housing complex called the Palace. In exchange for a place to stay, the narrator agrees to carry on Juan's life project, which involves a (real) 1941 research study called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. Though the research was begun in 1935 by Jan Gay, a lesbian anthropologist, the author named in the published study was psychiatrist George W. Henry, who used the text to pathologize homosexuality. Perusing Juan's copy of the study, the narrator discovers largely blacked-out pages featuring highlighted fragments of text that Juan calls "little poems of illumination," exercises in erasure that attempt to wrest the text from Dr. Henry and blow life back into the individual testimonies collected by Gay. Scans of the blacked-out pages of Sex Variants, in addition to related photographs and documents from Gay's fictional archive, punctuate the novel's short chapters, which capture Juan and the narrator's conversations. Composed of stories both real and invented, collective and personal--Juan frequently asks the narrator to tell him about his sexual exploits--the novel's interlocutory structure recalls Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. As playful, inventive, and at times kaleidoscopic as the book may be, the dialogue between Juan and the narrator often comes across as forced, with some blocks of storytelling (including the entirety of Torres' short story "Reverting to a Wild State," which was published in The New Yorker in 2011) feeling wedged in. The novel shines and surprises, though, in sections where the characters interweave cultural and historical artifacts, as well as memory and literary references, to reconstruct and revise queer history. Here, the novel's central question about where storytelling ends and history begins comes to the fore, albeit with no clear resolution. It's up to the reader, the narrator concludes, to decide where truth and fiction converge. An inventive novel that displays the scope of its author's ambitions.

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Starred review from September 1, 2023
A dozen years since his award-winning debut, We the Animals (2011), National Book Foundation "5 Under 35"-lauded Torres' meticulous sophomore title illuminates the relationship between two gay men--one dying, the other caregiving. Juan will never leave the Palace, a "desert building fallen into disrepair," but he's hoping his younger companion might "finish the project that had once consumed him, the story of a certain woman who shared his last name. Miss Jan Gay." Among Juan's few possessions is a 1948 tome, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, which, despite being credited to George W. Henry as author, was based on Jan Gay's pioneering 1930s interviews with homosexual men and women. (The book and Gay are real.) Juan's copy, however, has been defaced--or liberated?--with blacked-out text. Examples of the redacted pages interrupt and underscore the friends' cinematic conversation revealing intimate experiences lived and embellished, further enhanced by photographs and illustrations as if positing proof of existence. Torres combats erasure, reclaims history, and demands personal stories to create exquisite testimony to dismissed, yet defiant, humanity. Torres' literary acrobatics culminate in "A Sort of Postface," a meta-afterword that, despite insisting "Blackouts is a work of fiction," spectacularly displays his remarkable manipulations of fiction and reality.

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