Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists
by Richard Canning
Columbia University Press.
358 pages, $62.50 ($24.95, paper)
IN THIS, his second book in a proposed three-volume series, literary interviewer Richard Canning offers up more of the meaty, critically rich interviews of the kind that he gave readers in his first book, Gay Fiction Speaks (which I reviewed in the Fall 2001 issue of this journal). The twelve writers in Hear Us Out are an impressive bunch, including such well-known gay novelists as Christopher Bram, Michael Cunningham, Bernard Cooper, Stephen McCauley, Gary Indiana, and Colm Tóibín.
The interviews constitute what Canning, a professor in England, calls “the next chapter,” a group of writers whose work was “enabled” by the first volume’s writers (which included Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Allan Gurganus, and Dennis Cooper). The new interviews do indeed provide considerable insight into how the “enablers” influenced the next generation’s development, and they delve into the question of influence more generally. Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov are the names that come up the most persistently as mentors.
