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jennariaNIGHT WORK, by Laurie King.
Cover copy: Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, are called to the scene of carefully executed murder: the victim is a muscular man, handcuffed and strangled, a stun gun's faint burn on his chest and candy in his pocket. The likeliest person to want him dead, his often-abused wife, is meek and frail - and has an airtight alibi. Kate and Al are stumped, until a second body turns up - also zapped, cuffed and strangled...and carrying a candy bar. This victim: a convicted rapist. As newspaper headlines speculate about vendetta killings, a third death draws Kate and Al into a network of pitiless destruction that reaches far beyond San Francisco, a modern-style hit list with shudderingly primal roots.
What isn't on the cover, nor mentioned in the pull-quotes on the page just inside: Kate is gay.
Kate is not only gay, she's in a long-term relationship with another woman. A relationship which has clearly had its ups and downs, but which is loving and sexual and important to Kate and treated absolutely no differently from Al's relationship with his wife. Well, except insofar as Kate's the main character and Al isn't, so we see more of Kate's SO than Al's. This makes me unutterably happy.
I tend to shy away from 'gay fiction' as such, because it seems like most of what I encounter is all about alienation, hatred, AIDS...it's frankly depressing. I understand that for a lot of gays and lesbians, this is their experience, this is what they have to deal with. I have been extremely lucky: my family and friends have been nothing but accepting (at least to my face), and I live in an area that leans likewise. This means that my taste in 'gay fiction' is pretty much the same as in 'straight fiction,' if I can use that term. I want fluffy romances, I want daring adventure, I want labyrinthine mysteries...except that the lead and the love interest happen to be of the same gender, instead of opposite. And this is not easy to come by, unless I go the BL manga route (which I do).
This is not a perfect book. There's women's issues (as you might guess from the cover copy), which are generally handled gently, and cultural issues which I'm less sure about (there's an entire thread regarding 'This culture does X which is Wrong!', not to mention the fact that the 'primal roots' from the cover copy refer back to the Hindu goddess Kali.) And on the technical level, there's a key scene near the end of the book where Kate finds two people fighting, and we have the old 'Thank goodness, you're here to save me!' 'No, for I know that you are the murderer!' exchange, yadda yadda lots of drama. Except that even on re-reading, I still don't understand where and when Kate put things together. Did she figure this out earlier, or as she's speaking? If it's meant to be as she's speaking, then the text should say so, because otherwise I'm left to think she figured it out beforehand, and Ms. King just left out that bit for the sake of a few minutes' more suspense/drama during that final confrontation, which is Bad Form. Bah.
So it's not a perfect book by any stretch. But for all that, it's still counterbalanced by the beginning of the book, and that delicious, slow-growing realization that no really, 'Lee' is not only Kate's lover but a woman, and it's not just my imagination. For that, I will forgive one hell of a lot of awkwardness, even in the climax of the book.
Cover copy: Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, are called to the scene of carefully executed murder: the victim is a muscular man, handcuffed and strangled, a stun gun's faint burn on his chest and candy in his pocket. The likeliest person to want him dead, his often-abused wife, is meek and frail - and has an airtight alibi. Kate and Al are stumped, until a second body turns up - also zapped, cuffed and strangled...and carrying a candy bar. This victim: a convicted rapist. As newspaper headlines speculate about vendetta killings, a third death draws Kate and Al into a network of pitiless destruction that reaches far beyond San Francisco, a modern-style hit list with shudderingly primal roots.
What isn't on the cover, nor mentioned in the pull-quotes on the page just inside: Kate is gay.
Kate is not only gay, she's in a long-term relationship with another woman. A relationship which has clearly had its ups and downs, but which is loving and sexual and important to Kate and treated absolutely no differently from Al's relationship with his wife. Well, except insofar as Kate's the main character and Al isn't, so we see more of Kate's SO than Al's. This makes me unutterably happy.
I tend to shy away from 'gay fiction' as such, because it seems like most of what I encounter is all about alienation, hatred, AIDS...it's frankly depressing. I understand that for a lot of gays and lesbians, this is their experience, this is what they have to deal with. I have been extremely lucky: my family and friends have been nothing but accepting (at least to my face), and I live in an area that leans likewise. This means that my taste in 'gay fiction' is pretty much the same as in 'straight fiction,' if I can use that term. I want fluffy romances, I want daring adventure, I want labyrinthine mysteries...except that the lead and the love interest happen to be of the same gender, instead of opposite. And this is not easy to come by, unless I go the BL manga route (which I do).
This is not a perfect book. There's women's issues (as you might guess from the cover copy), which are generally handled gently, and cultural issues which I'm less sure about (there's an entire thread regarding 'This culture does X which is Wrong!', not to mention the fact that the 'primal roots' from the cover copy refer back to the Hindu goddess Kali.) And on the technical level, there's a key scene near the end of the book where Kate finds two people fighting, and we have the old 'Thank goodness, you're here to save me!' 'No, for I know that you are the murderer!' exchange, yadda yadda lots of drama. Except that even on re-reading, I still don't understand where and when Kate put things together. Did she figure this out earlier, or as she's speaking? If it's meant to be as she's speaking, then the text should say so, because otherwise I'm left to think she figured it out beforehand, and Ms. King just left out that bit for the sake of a few minutes' more suspense/drama during that final confrontation, which is Bad Form. Bah.
So it's not a perfect book by any stretch. But for all that, it's still counterbalanced by the beginning of the book, and that delicious, slow-growing realization that no really, 'Lee' is not only Kate's lover but a woman, and it's not just my imagination. For that, I will forgive one hell of a lot of awkwardness, even in the climax of the book.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-08 10:23 pm (UTC)This is close to what and why I like in fiction. There have been some upbeat gay paperbacks, but not too many, especially after AIDS was well-known. I kept thinking there were only two or three storylines that were acceptable in a "gay" book, as opposed to a book where some characters might be gay. (I recall going through the theater listings in about 1990, looking for something to interest a guest. There were maybe 6 gay-theme plays in the L.A. small-theater scene, and *all* of them were about people with AIDS in some way or another.) Of course, in mainstream publishing gay characters had their own set of problems most of the time, too. This is one reason I've always liked slash, however unlike the concurrent gay subculture it was.
I have a theory that the AIDS epidemic, in being tied to gay subculture, paradoxically made it okay to legitimize -- well, to *begin* to legitimize -- gay/bi/other sexuality in the mainstream. With AIDS, gays were all going to die, just like in the mainstream gay narrative! So it was okay for us to be real people; and the dying-out, while all too real, substituted a percentage for the whole.