January-February 2022
IN JANUARY, singer-songwriter Janis Ian releases what she calls her “swan song” album, The Light at the End of the Line (Rude Girl Records). With nine Grammy nominations and two wins, the singer at age seventy has nothing left to prove, but she delivers an astoundingly resonant collection, her first full album in fifteen years.
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A LOVE TRIANGLE involving a policeman, his male lover, and the lover’s wife is the subject of Bethan Roberts’ new novel My Policeman. Set in 1950s England, the story was inspired by novelist E. M. Forster’s long-term relationship with policeman Bob Buckingham and his wife May. The novel is currently being made into a major motion picture for release in 2022 starring actor and singer Harry Styles (Dunkirk), actress Emma Corrin (The Crown), and British actor David Dawson.
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This story is told from the point of view of Fitzgerald’s original supporting character, Jordan Baker, who is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese-American protagonist taking on the American Dream and all its glittering quirks and failures.
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Wilkinson’s book is about his search for his father and, by extension, his roots and his identity. There was a great-grandfather who hailed from the Canary Islands and stowed away on a ship bound for Uruguay. But even this flimsy fact is cause for disappointment: “No one in my family now knows or cares what he did or why.”
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BRANDON TAYLOR’S second book, Filthy Animals, is a collection of short stories alternating between connected and stand-alone tales. The linked ones tell the story of Lionel, a Black graduate student in mathematics, and his evolving relationship with a white couple, Charles and Sophie, both dancers.
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In its most basic form, sexual racism is rejecting sex with another person based on race or race-based fetishizing and objectification. According to C. Winter Han, associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College and author of Racial Erotics, the problem is larger than just who desires whom as a sex partner.
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Author E. J. Levy, who holds a history degree from Yale, is especially good at detailing the particulars associated with that world and period. This research is often illuminating, as when the narrator explains that Barry could have neither attended Oxford or Cambridge nor held public office, because the Test Act barred Catholics from doing so.
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REFERENCES to extreme weather appear often in this era of climate change, even in the most unlikely contexts. Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost combines the personal with the universal, and the images of permanent ice and other transparent substances operate on several levels.
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Reviews of THE ISOLATION ARTIST: Scandal, Deception and the Last Days of Robert Indiana; HE AUDACITY OF A KISS Love, Art, and Liberation; and EDGEMERE.
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Bolla picks up other thematic strands from Statovci’s earlier works. In it, as in Crossing, he explores the aftereffects of a brief but intense relationship. Bolla, too, is characterized throughout by an atmosphere of oppressiveness, with sharp, unrelenting depictions of both sociopolitical and psychological horrors and the devastation that sits at the intersection of these traumas. In all three novels, the Balkan conflicts create an anxious setting for characters who are exploring subversive or transgressive ways of being in a society bound by patriarchal, normative family traditions.
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