International Gay & Lesbian Review

Wrestling With Angels

• Fiction
• Publisher: Xlibris
• Publication Date: 2001
• 252 pages

Clifton Snider, better known as a poet, recently published his third novel. Wrestling with Angels a kind of sequel to his autobiographical novel, Bare Roots (2001), which, however, deals entirely with an only child's coming of age and acceptance of his homosexuality. Written immediately after Bare Roots in the early 1980's but not published until late 2001, Wrestling with Angels is even more autobiographical, in effect a fictionalized memoir, with names of persons and places changed, focusing on perhaps the most traumatic episode in Snider's life, the unsolved disappearance and presumed murder of his older brother at the age of 34. Subtitled "A Tale of Two Brothers," the book picks up where Bare Roots ended, detailing the interwoven lives of the gay narrator and his gay sibling in their late teens, twenties, and early thirties. Wrestling with Angels is a searing indictment of the dangers of a fundamentalist upbringing, the father of the brothers being a pastor of the First Assembly of God church. It is a grim, even brutal but relentlessly truthful story about two troubled young men, the younger one more intelligent, sensitive, and "out" than the older, more macho, materialistic, and closeted, whose personalities are molded by a narrow religious training and environment in which smoking, drinking, dancing, listening to rock music, and, of course, premarital sex are forbidden, against which both rebel with promiscuity, drugs, and alcohol. (One especially memorable scene, more familiar to the compulsive than to the casual drinker, is a harrowing description of alcoholic panic found on pages 227-228.) The book, dedicated to the memory of the older brother, previously memorialized in a poem in Snider's most recent book of poems, The Alchemy of Opposites (2000), is, in effect, a prose memorial to the brother. Each chapter, moreover, is prefaced by a poem published earlier in Snider's chapbook, Bad Smoke, Good Body (1980), which deals with his departed brother, and the last page in Wrestling with Angels is a poem "A Last Goodbye" written on what would have been his brother's fiftieth birthday. The poetry is moving and written, naturally, with greater economy than the prose, which, however, resembles it in its mannerism of avoiding connectives. The style, which might have been honed a bit by a sharp-eyed editor, is nevertheless straightforward and serviceable, the dialogue natural and smooth. Set largely in Southern California and, specifically, in Long Beach, Wrestling with Angels contains many references to gay bars (slightly disguised), local landmarks and culture, and California State University, Long Beach, where Snider studied and now teaches. Residents of that city will experience the pleasure of recognition. The author's personal, factual "Afterword," unexpected in a novel but fitting for a memoir, describes the efforts--or, in Snider's somewhat bitter view, non-efforts--of the police to investigate fully his brother's strange disappearance. He implies that the latter's homosexuality had something to do with this scanty investigation. All in all, Wrestling with Angels is an unusual story that holds the reader's attention throughout. One looks forward to reading its sequel, the probably less dramatic account of the calmer adventures of middle age--and possibly, one hopes, containing the solution of the obsessive mystery of the vanished brother.

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