The Pride of Krakow
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Setting the action in 2005 Poland, Cox has effectively created a series of collisions and contradictions in his second novel. His first, Shuck, told the barely veiled autobiographical story of a hustler, porn actor, and erotic photography model scraping out a living in New York City in the 90’s. There was a gritty realism to Cox’s prose, and that has remained a constant, but here his plot points begin to move into the surreal. This creates a pleasing formal dynamic, as personal and political tensions rise for the characters.

Poles were learning their way in a brave new free world, at this time one of the emerging economies in what had until recently been part of the repressive Soviet bloc. It’s an irony clearly not lost on Cox that amid the newfound liberties in this heavily Catholic state are the extremely hostile statements and acts of a virulently homophobic populace. The Solidarity movement, it seems, did not extend to queers, and if the term “gay liberation” now sounds quaint in much of the “post-gay” Western world, that notion hasn’t sunk in in Poland even today. The choice in geography effectively reminds Western, urban-dwelling queer readers of what a pre-Stonewall underground might feel like—which neatly sets up another twist: in this novel about gay sexual liberation and identity, the author makes his central romance a heterosexual one. Avoiding the easy gay-straight divide and making his central romance an opposite-sex one renders this otherwise queer book even more brazen.

All of these collisions make for a strange reading experience, as though one is caught up in a multiple personality disorder. There is brutal repression in the midst of newfound emancipation, an opposite-sex tryst at the center of queer defiance, and the destructive power of fire as a form of extreme progressive protest. Precisely how many novels are we in? And amid a lot of the pain—Cox does a good job of describing violent homophobic mob scenes in heart-wrenching detail—he also allows for some hilarious jabs at his characters. At one point, the earnest, self-important, bisexual artist Radek meditates on the meaning of art. “That’s the thing,” he tells us, “we all want art to hurt us, but only through the screams of others.”

Despite the insanity of it all, one of the key strengths of this book is the way it maintains a powerful verisimilitude. Cox did teach English as a second language in Poland for a year, and his bio indicates that “his home burned down in 2007.” It’s to his credit that he can maintain such a unique formal high-wire act, keeping all of his balls in the air while making every syllable ring true. Krakow Melt is a powerful bit of queer transgressive fiction, a fascinating meditation on what it means to be an outsider.