Thomas Grattan

The Publisher Says: A young gay man upends the lives of a powerful art-world couple in this steamy novel of self-discovery.

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon―handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction―takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him―and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I kept making dirty wordplay on this title as my review's first line. Trouble with that is nothing I can come (!) up (!) with is steamier or hornier than the book itself is.

This is NOT straight-people safe. This is not, in all honesty, a book to read at work, or on public transport, unless you're wearing very, very loosely pleated trousers. Or baiting your hook.

It's also not one-handed reading, I hasten to add. The story is very much the point of the sexual situations, not the other way around. Think of it as Ripley made for PornHub not Netflix, nor perish forbid that neutered but pretty-to-look-at theatrical film. That perhaps overplays the calculation and manipulation that Gordon commits to in achieving his goal of finding himself (between two powerful people's bodies), and discovering his true inner self(ish bastard). But make no mistake that Gordon is very much a Young Man from the Provinces who very clearly knows what he left behind he deliberately rejected. Now he needs to understand how to work his natural gifts while he's got youth and a complete absence of the will to say "no" on his side.

The reason I resonated so deep(!)ly to the story is Author Grattan's way of making it: Episodic, dreamlike, in the flow. That knocked off the meaner interpretations I leapt to about Gordon's thoughtlessness, his lack of a core concern for how his behavior might affect others. It is not yet in him (!) to be calculating. It is, in other words, a case of his being canny versus being savvy. Gordon instinctively responds to the way others see him and shows them that side. A savvy operator would, instead move to seduce those who have what he wants. Those people are often false-feeling and mistrusted, Gordon is too real in his desire to be desired to give off a warning signal, a fake vibe.

Absence of an organizing principle often gets mistaken for aimlessness. Author Grattan takes on a daunting task of presenting the story of Gordon, void of course, and needing thus to use authorial sleight of hand to keep his reader from feeling lost and unconnected the way Gordon is. That is a supremely difficult thing to do. For the most part I think his choice of sexual contexts serves admirably to ground and connect us to Gordon. There's so much pleasure in reading the elegant prose of the story, and so much about the emotional nature of those around Gordon to keep a lit-fic reader going. Particularly telling is Gordon's relations with the old guys in the story. He might not lust after them as they do him, but he desires...something, some meaningful intangible benefit to go with the tangible exchanges between them; does he get it? He doesn't know, because he doesn't know what he's looking for, The older men get what they want though likely not what they need, which is again intangible: connection. A future. Raising more than a flagging half-staff, shall we say.

This is consonant with my own life.

My half-star docked off dissatisfaction was Gordon's religious father begging for his son's withdrawn love. That's not so baldly expressed, of course, as I've done but it honestly does not ring true at all. Religious fathers with gay sons imght want to convert them to straightness but making themselves emotionally vulnerable? Nope. I don't, honestly, see that happening between most any father and son. And that joined a certain vague sense I could never coalesce around an actual idea, that Gordon was not really interested in himself enough to attract the caliber of men he does. That's as close as I can come to articulating a kind-of Forrest Gumpishness about him that did not jibe with narrative.

Lovely writing made the ending work. Lesser talent would've fumbled that one, and it was a close-run thing even so. A book I recommend to gay-male readers of literary prose.

All others, at your own risk.… (altro)

I changed my mind about this book several times while I was in the process of reading it - ultimately I went from thinking it was just okay to thinking it was amazing. Told in short, clipped and understated sentences, it rather resembles a book in translation. So much of the book is revealed not by what is written as by what is left unsaid. The obvious love and romance in the story come across as unsentimental - clipped just like the book's sentences. A multi-generational story, it captures a wonderful array of feelings and emotions that all seem very genuine. What might otherwise be interpreted as often being cold and austere, ends up revealing itself to be an exploration of a transcendent empathy. Highly recommended.… (altro)

The premise of this novel sounded intriguing: Beate's family escaped from the DDR in the sixties, when she was a small girl. After the Wende, she decides to move back from America to her parents' old house on the Baltic coast, taking her two teenage children with her. The son is gay, the daughter gets involved with trying to protect a group of refugees who are being intimidated by Neo-nazis, and Beate has to find a way to make a living in a community that is crumbling away into emigration and unemployment.

And of course that is interesting, for the length of a chapter or two. Unfortunately, once he's set up that situation, Grattan doesn't seem to have any very clear ideas how to fill up the gaps he's left himself between 1966 and 1990 in one direction, and between 1990 and 2016 in the other. He simply lets his characters behave in the sort of random, purposeless and inconsistent ways that would be perfectly normal for real people, but isn't what we look for when we're paying someone to make up an interesting story about them. There are no resolutions, no lessons to be learnt, no development of characters, no unusual insights into the larger problems of the world around them, it's just one damn thing after another (except during the flashback chapters, when of course it's one damn thing before another).

It's a shame that Grattan is such a competent and reasonably lively writer, because you are left feeling how much better a book this could have been. When he's not trying too hard, he has no trouble keeping you interested in the detail of what he's telling you about. He does clearly feel a sense of obligation to be literary occasionally, with unfortunate and rather distracting results ("Beate's daughter was like a Russian novel: admirable, but difficult to hold."). The German setting of most of the book and the convention that much of the time characters are speaking German where we read English also get him into trouble: people say things that just don't back-translate into German in any obvious way (people in the DDR addressing each other as "Citizen" as though they were in 1790s France); there are incongruously American things like buckets of ice and garden swimming pools, or someone "runs a stop sign". And then there's that mid-sixties German hospital with rooms full of beeping machines, which allows patients to phone home in the middle of the night...

On the whole, I wouldn't recommend this, but Grattan looks like someone to watch. The problems of this novel are mostly technical, and he's clearly got things to say: I'm sure his next book will be better.… (altro)