March 1991

 

Book Review: The Body and its Dangers

The Body and itsDangers by Allen Barnett.
St. Martin's Press, hardcover, $19.95.
Reviewed by Hugh Coyle

Over the past decade, gay literature has
done more than simply increase in the
number of titles tucked away discreetly at
the backs of "friendly" bookstores. Writers
have pushed the frontier further and further
beyond the stories of coming out and un-
controlled lust which, though they have
become somewhat cliched, continue to
dominate the gay fiction market.

The terrain Allen Barnett explores in
his excellent first collection, The Body and
its Dangers, is not new or shocking, though
his treatment of that territory is startlingly
original. Where others have been content to
drive quickly through and catch only
glimpses of the world at large, Barnett
walks us slowly through the landscape and
bids us to linger here and there, to listen to
thought as well as conversation as we meet
and observe his characters.

With a lyrical sense of metaphor, Bar-
nett strips his characters down to the soul.
But rather than cringe in modest humility,
these characters revel in the liberation of
thought and use the opportunity to push
themselves further along in their own jour-
neys. Unharnpered by the excesses of the
material world, they slip more fluidly
through the doorway to the next level.

This is particularly evident in the sto-
ries concerning people with AIDS. In "The
Times As It Knows Us," a gathering of Fire
Island veterans serves as a microcosm of
the gay community at large as it attempts to
cope both physically and emotionally with
its own deterioration. The title of the story
itself is indicative of Bamett’s intrepid and,
at times, ruthless treatment of the issues
surrounding the AIDS epidemic, with the
gay and straight worlds alike subject to his
critical scrutiny.

Though Barnett occasionally slides
into the tepid waters of pathos, he is most
effective when he takes bracing risks. Dark
humor such as Enzo's post-mortem notice
in "The Times As It Knows Us" ("Dead
GWM, loved 1950s rock and roll, Arts and
Crafts ceramics, back issues of Gourmet
magazine. Seeking similar who lived in
past for quiet nights leading to long-term
relationship") capture the full range of feel-
ings. often associated with AIDS. Rather
than distill the various aspects of emotion,
Barnett offers them up as they are, full of
contradiction and confusion, still simmer-
ing in their own painful ironies.

Bamett’s ability to shape emotion and
explore the nuances of a situation are at
their most devastating in his description of
the Quilt in the story “Succor:” “And then
there was the Quilt touring the country like
a movable wake, panel upon panel of fab-
rics stitched together like a foldable, dry-
cleanable cemetery. Seeing abeautiful man
reduced to a name sewn on a bedspread
made (Kerch) call a woman friend, an art-
ist, to say, ‘Karen, you’re the only one I’d
trust with my panel.’ She said to him, ‘Why
don’t I make one up now and you can sleep
with it.”’

Perhaps the most powerful story in the
collection is "Philostorgy, Now Obscure,"
which follows Preston Wallace through his
own (and his friends‘) acceptance of his
HIV+ condition. This process brings about
some unexpected revelations: "A therapist
had once told Preston that depression was
likely to be his natural state, where the
gravity of his mind would keep him despite
all attempts at levity; but now it seemed that
even when he was depressed there was a
tow rope of some kind dragging him back
toward happiness."

In another scene, Preston sets about
cleaning his apartment immediately after

and

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his initial diagnosis, realizing as he moves
from cleaning to actually discarding old
unwanted items: "Better to throw it away
than to have someone find it, lay claim to it,
or reduce his life to it."

That Barnett resists the temptation to
reduce the lives of his characters in these
stories is perhaps his greatest achievement.
Even as they approach death, the promise
of some life remains, as witnessed by Kerch
in the story "Succor:" "There were cities he
had never been to - Carthage, Alexandria,
Babylon...Nothing remained but what
remained to be seen."

Though Barnett's characters are in the
most severe situations of the spirit, they
move relentlessly forward in a world of
never-ending possibility. In an almost self-
reflective moment in "Succor," he writes:
"It was as if the only way to rationalize the
confusion of the world was to control the
language used to describe it."

Seen in this light, the stories in The
Body and itsDangers gain extra weight and
heft in the hands of an author who sees
creativity not only as a means of refining
experience, but also as a means of pushing
that experience to its furthest limits of defi-
nition. Barnett himself has lost a number of
close friends to AIDS, and many of the
characters in his stories bear ghostly wit-
ness to these losses as Barnett uses the
names of his companions for his characters
as well.

The Body and its Dangers is a moving
and heartfelt tribute to the gay experience
in difficult times. It reaches beyond the
rubric of literature and offers us an enlight-
ening introduction to the philosophical and
spiritual side of homosexuality as well.
From its very conception to the masterful
treatment of the vafious themes, this collec-
tion of short stories is sure to haunt the
emotional memory of many a reader.

    

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