America’s Boy
by Wade Rouse
Dutton. 340 pages, $24.95
THE CHALLENGE for any writer of a memoir is to make the story interesting to someone else who, unlike a psychotherapist, isn’t being paid to hear it. A writer’s fame can guarantee an audience, but those lacking fame often resort to hyperbole and sensational drama. This is not true of Wade Rouse in his coming-of-age memoir, America’s Boy. While the world may have seen plenty of coming-of-age and coming-out stories, there’s always something new to learn from a well-crafted and thoughtful account of this rite of passage. Rouse’s story is promising in that he has so many experiences to offer—including being gay in rural America, being (until recently) extremely overweight, and overcoming a devastating guilt about the death of his brother.
Rouse’s stories about his family sometimes suggest the rigorous self-examination that should characterize a memoir. His warm and often funny portraits of family members may start with their idiosyncrasies, but the best move well beyond caricature. Rouse is able, for example, to write with conviction about his maternal grandfather’s faults—his drinking and the apparent shame he feels with regard to his effeminate grandson—but also with compassion for the man’s emotional fragility. His description of secretly observing his mother as she mourned the death of her elder son captures her shock and raw grief, while attesting to the distance that exists between her and her remaining son. But, for all this potential, America’s Boy is marked by persistent errors and shortcuts in style that represent a pattern of carelessness and undermine Rouse’s credibility, not to mention the effectiveness of his prose. While the anecdotal, collage-like structure of the book can be an effective way to mimic the associative play of memory, it can also become a device for moving forward without sufficient reflection. Failure to integrate and focus creates unnecessary repetition and might explain some of the extraneous and cliché-ridden exposition. Rouse also exhibits a tendency to fall back on the quick and easy manufacture of drama in paragraphs that consist of one brief declarative sentence, a device that can make such sentences sound like self-parodies. And he’s consistently inconsistent in his use of tense, often switching from past to present for no apparent reason in the middle of an observation, in this way undermining the very method he has chosen for differentiating past events from present commentary. Any memoirist who writes for his readers’ enlightenment and not just for his own relief needs to establish his readers’ trust in his honesty about his past. But even today, for example, we find Rouse suggesting that the reason he sabotaged his brother’s motorcycle was out of concern and not in retaliation for the humiliation his brother dealt him on the occasion of his first ride. At other times he claims extraordinary prescience, as when, upon seeing police cars arrive at his family’s cabin, he not only knew immediately that his brother was dead but also anticipated the radical change in his life that would follow. Rouse shows he’s capable of better in portrayals of several people who crossed his path briefly or peripherally but changed his life. He recalls with great respect the story of a lesbian couple who ran the town’s candy store. Everyone in town thought they were sisters, but his grandmother let him in on their secret at an early age, providing him with hope that he could have a life different from the one laid out for a typical (straight) Ozark boy. When he comes out to a stripper named Brandywine after she fails to arouse him during a lap dance, Rouse eschews the “heart of gold” trope and reveals a sincere respect and gratitude. There’s no doubt that Rouse has devoted enormous energy to a task that many lack the emotional resources or resilience to attempt. Having finally come out, he lived through the painful rituals of looking for love—and the more difficult task of letting himself have the real thing once he found it. He ends the book on a note of almost cheerful satisfaction, having survived a suicide attempt and learned to live with his brother’s death. And yet, in the end America’s Boy reads more like a therapeutic step in a process that might one day yield a more rigorous analysis of an eventful life story. Thomas March, a poet and critic, has work forthcoming in The Believer, Diner, and Shenandoah.
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