Down For Whatever
by Frederick Smith
Kensington Books. 281 pages, $14. (paper)
THE BIBLE for writing quality fiction advances the following three commandments: avoid clichés, develop a distinctive voice, and show rather than tell. Occasionally, there comes a novel that stands in direct opposition to these commandments and still manages to render a decent narrative. Frederick Smith’s debut title, Down for Whatever, is not such a novel.
Down for Whatever chronicles the triumphs and travails of four gay men of color—Keith Hemmings, Tommie Jordan, Rafael Dominguez, and Marco Antonio Vega—as they search for love and happiness across cultural boundaries. Smith spits in the face of the first literary commandment when he ends his first page with the hackneyed phrase, “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Second, he sidesteps the dictum about developing a distinctive voice by having his four characters narrate the story, but alas he employs cheap tricks of vernacular to differentiate the voices of four otherwise homogeneous characters. To round out his three-fold abrogation of the rules, he clogs his prose with homily and diatribe, which the characters deliver as if reading them from cue cards. Instead of showing their emotions, the characters in Down for Whatever announce their emotions quite literally. After Keith’s love interest flirts with his friend Rafael, Keith delivers the following soliloquy: “What I know to be true is that Cesar is not into me anymore. Maybe he never really was, especially from day one when he and Rafael got connected at Tempo. It makes me sad.” To his credit, Smith tackles a complex subject: interracial dating in the Black and Latino gay communities. Embrangled in this topic are issues of racism, classism, internalized homophobia, and post-traumatic slavery disorder. Smith adds layers to his story with various subplots, one of the most intriguing of which involves Keesha, the seven-year-old daughter of Tommie Jordan’s drug-addicted sister. Further, Smith avoids the stereotypical portrayal of black and Latino men by giving his characters meaningful careers. Keith Hemmings works as a diversity trainer while his love interest Cesar teaches history and Chicano studies. These professions scaffold the characters’ political discourse which would otherwise seem off-hand and gratuitous. Though the narrative bumbles about, providing little or no segue between repartee and rant, Down for Whatever does tackle difficult issues. “I thought the days of being invisible where over,” Keith says of his alienating experience at a Latino club, “when I stopped trying to fit in with white boys at white bars.” To date, no novelist has taken a hard and serious look at the allegiance and infidelities of the black and Latino homosexuals and their minority status within a white gay culture. Frederick Smith endeavors to do this. But for all these noble efforts, Smith would have been better served had he heeded the fundamental rules of every fiction workshop you’ve ever attended. The result is that Down for Whatever is an earnest treatise about a social problem but not an altogether successful first attempt at writing fiction.
