FURNACE CREEK: A Novel
by Joseph Allen Boone
Eyewear publishing. 372 pages, $26.
JOSEPH ALLEN BOONE’S debut novel, Furnace Creek, is a contemporary queering of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in which the author transposes key elements of the classic narrative to 20th-century America, centering the story upon a gay stand-in for the more conventional Pip. Boone, a professor of English and gender studies at USC, clearly knows whereof he speaks. In such scholarly works as Tradition Counter Tradition, Libidinal Currents and The Homoerotics of Orientalism, Boone displays a wide-ranging knowledge of the novel and how it reflects—and sometimes influences—social codes around gender and sexuality.
