Toby Johnson: Toby Johnson is the editor of White Crane: A Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality. This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#38). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
This novel by veteran gay writer Daniel Curzon is noteworthy for several reasons. Only one of them has to do with the content and message of the novel; the others have to do with its style and medium of publication.
“Only the Good Parts” is written following the rather old-fashioned technique of presenting letters between the characters of the story. What modernizes this rather formal, dispassionate and distant gimmick is that Curzon's characters are sending each other faxes and emails and notes slipped under doors. There is an immediacy to the communications which make them surprisingly compelling.
This gimmick does force some contrivance in the plot. The quarreling gay couple who form the core of the novel are forced into long distance situations so that there are written communications between them. And the reader can't help but wonder if their quarrels might not be resolvable by just giving each other a big hug; something the stylistic convention doesn't allow.
What's amazing is how much information can be conveyed through these little snippets passing between the characters. Eliminated are all the usual tools of the novelist; gone are the adjectives and descriptive passages; gone is the writer's lyric prose; gone the composition of place and character. Everything is down to the bare bones of communication about the business of ther story. It makes for fast, page-turning reading.
Curzon's been an important and eccentric character in gay publishing for years. Most of his books have been self-published; he's stood as a sort of defiant maverick against the trends and fads, ups and down of the publishing business. “Only the Good Parts” champions a potentially revolutionary new way of publishing that truly threatens that entire industry.
Modern technology now makes it possible to market books electronically, to send them as data files through the phone lines to appear on a computer screen with no book ever being manufactured, and to manufacture books (for those who want something to hold in the hand, not just see on the screen) one at a time to order. “Only the Good Parts” is published by Xlibris.com. At the publisher's website, one can find a description of the book and an excerpt.
Then with a few mouse clicks, if one is interested, one can buy the electronic downloadable version (for $8) or a very nice hardbound version ($24.95) which will be produced and sent by mail within a few weeks.
A major problem in the pubishing industry is that traditionally books are manufactured in quantity before anybody ever indicates they want to read them.
At the top the industry is focused on hot shot editors trying to outguess the public and upcoming cultural trends by at least a year. Publishing houses invest huge sums of money on those guesses. Of course, a whole spin-off industry exists to sell the remainders, i.e., the books that got produced but never bought, at a tremendous discount.
Authors (who, after all, make up the real core of the business) suffer at least two indignities because of this. First, of course, it's hard to get a book published unless the publisher can be sure they can get their money back. That means the industry caters to the so-called lowest common denominator reader. And too many biographies of TV and movie stars get published and too many interesting but idiosyncratic manuscripts get rejected.
Second, publishers get taxed on the inventory they accumulate, so they can't afford to maintain slow sellers in their warehouses. Books quickly go out of print, are remaindered, or are just shredded in order to control inventory costs. Manufacturing a book to order sidesteps both problems.
And, in certain ways, these are especially problems in the gay genre. Big publishers require big sales figures. In fact, of course, gay people are stastistically more likely to read books, but we're still a marginal market. What confuses matters even more is that every so often the New York publishers jump on the gay bandwagon, proclaiming a newly discovered market. That results in expansion of gay-themed books in mainstream bookstores which threatens the small network of independent gay bookstores (that in many ways make up the backbone of the national gay community). We all think it's nice that our literature is widely available in mainstream stores; it seems to demonstrate social acceptance. But the fact is it pulls business from gay stores, hurts gay small presses that can't get into the mainstream stores. And it allows homosexuals access to the books without having to make the coming-out step of going to a gay bookstore and therefore discovering what the community really consists of. And, worse, when the New York publishers decide to move on to a yet newer market, the plethora of gay books disappears (into the shredders) and, in the long run, there are fewer titles available and fewer bookstores.
Xlibris cuts through many of these issues. From the author's point of view, it's a godsend. For about $500 you can bring your own book out and market it precisely to the people who'll be interested in it. (And $500 is easily what it costs to xerox multiple copies of manuscript and send them to potential publishers who are generally too busy looking for blockbusters to pay any attention to the deluge of submissions they receive.)
On the other hand, this new technological trend threatens the bookstores directly by simply leaving them out of the interaction completely. The gay
community one could stumble upon by coming into a gay bookstore is reduced to the electronic presence on the Internet.
Daniel Curzon's book is important more for the way it exists than for what it's about. Oh, by the way, what the book's about is gay parenting by artificial insemination. The main character, Marc Brandt, connects with a lesbian midwife because he's realized that his being gay does not necessarily exclude the possibility of having a child (and adding his genes back to the collective pool). His lover, Gordon, something of a spoiled narcissitic bitch, derides Marc's desires and thereby unwittingly initiates the unravelling of their relationship.
For the first half of the book, it seems like the author is championing gay men having children in some sort of copperative arrangement with lesbian couples. Certainly one of the themes in modern gay life.
By the second half, when one of the lesbian mothers has gotten so paranoid of Marc and so possessive of the child that she's driven her lover into a mental hospital and is threatening to charge Marc with sexual abuse, the argument for having offspring this way is certainly weakened.
“Only the Good Parts” ends up discussing all the pros and cons. It's not entirely clear which side of the argument the author comes down on, but from his wheelchair he seems much the worse for his attempt at parenthood.
It's a good book. Interesting. Provocative. For all sorts of reasons.
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