Sky Gilbert

"If I'm going to tell you about it, I have to start back in 1951, with the black apartment and the black sheets." So begins Sky Gilbert's novel, Brother Dumb (ECW, 2007). If it sort of reminds you of the opening of The Catcher in the Rye, that's no surprise. Echoes of J.D. Salinger resound on every page.

But first, who is Sky Gilbert?

His website invites many answers (or questions). Quill and Quire offers a profile. Wikipedia tell us he is:

Schuyler Lee (Sky) Gilbert, Jr. (born December 20, 1952) is a Canadian writer, actor, academic and drag performer. Born in Norwich, Connecticut, he studied theatre in Toronto, Ontario at York University and the University of Toronto, before becoming co-founder and artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times, a Toronto theatre company dedicated to LGBT drama. Gilbert's drag name is Jane.

Although primarily a playwright, Gilbert has also published novels, poetry and an autobiography. He has also been a regular columnist for Toronto's eye weekly. Many of Gilbert's works are produced at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Gilbert holds the University Chair in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

In other words, he's well accomplished in many fields, though a broad popular audience has not been his reward. Yet.

I would like to write about Brother Dumb by exploring it within the context of Gilbert's other work, but I don't know his other work beyond reading some poems in an anthology in the mid-1990s. I do remember those poems, though, as being direct and honest and, therefore, powerful.

Brother Dumb is direct, honest, and powerful, too, but it is also deceptive and complex. In Quill and Quire, Alex Good called the book an "unconvincing attempt to channel Holden Caufield" that is also a "well-paced and provocative book that sets itself an enormous creative challenge." We can no longer avoid it; a plot summary is in order.

It begins, as above, with the black apartment. The narrator is a famous writer, a recluse, and he speaks directly to the reader, confessing the story of his erotic attachments. The factual elements of the narrator's life align strikingly close to the known facts about J.D. Salinger. The writer is in World War II, publishes early stories in a prestigious New York magazine, writes a novel about a juvenile delinquint, takes a strong interest in Buddhism, moves to the country, as a 50-ish-year-old invites an 18-year-old girl to live with him.

The broad sweep will suffice. One must ask: Is Gilbert channeling Caufield or the author of Franny and Zooey?

This is why I called Brother Dumb deceptive. If you really want to hear about it, it's confusing. One can read and enjoy the novel without knowing anything about Salinger, but if one does: What is one to think? One is tempted to call Brother Dumb the Salinger sequel we've been waiting four decades to receive. Except it isn't.

Like many of Salinger's protagnoists, Gilbert's narrator attempts to draw the reader into a bond of "specialness." Only we understand what is real, what is good, what is right, the narrator suggests. The novel is a confession. Many things in the narrator's life have gone wrong. He is writing to explain himself, but also to find that special audience of special people. The gifted ones, the sensitive ones. The vulnerable ones.

For there is more than a little creepy about the narrator's plea. He is attracted to women much, much younger than himself. He is attracted to their childlike qualities. Years ago, Mary McCarthy wrote about Salinger's famous Glass family. Her essay, called "J.D. Salinger's closed circuit," appeared in Harper's, October 1962. What she found, she called "terrifying." This online "profile of a pedophile," in that regard, is not comforting.

McCarthy found the Glass family too cut off from the rest of humanity to be interesting. Pedophiles create alternate realities of "specialness" between themselves and their victims. One must be clear at this point to return to the fact that we are talking about a novel here. Salinger is fact, but Brother Dumb is fiction.

Like Nabokov's Lolita, Brother Dumb provides a complicated beauty. This is not a book that provides the simple pleasure of a well-told story.

Brother Dumb, like Lolita, is the story of one man's attempt to find "love." I put the word in quotation marks, because these are also books that complicate traditional, popular notions of love. That's about the most neutral way of stating that.

Yet, what is love if not complicated?

One of the features of Salinger's books is that his characters seek enlightenment, or transcendent reality. This is High Romanticism's legacy. Franny collapses and the reader may think she's had a spiritual epiphany. My mother, on the other hand, thought the poor girl was pregnant.

Love is sometimes framed as the gateway to the other side. This is oversimplistic nonsense.

McCarthy's essay on Salinger highlights the oversimplistic nonsense of Salinger's novels. Brother Dumb takes us through similar territory. The idealization of love is tempting. It's even sometimes rewarding. It can also be tragic, terrifying and abusive.

Brother Dumb is an unsettling book. It is a remarkable achievement. Alex Good suggested in his review that Salinger would have led the readers on "a merrier chase." I'm not so sure.

I find that thought, actually, a little creepy.

Postscript:

There's something else. Language. The writing process. The ability of language to approach truth. How language may or may not define the outer limits of reality. How language may or may not refer to anything but itself.

I don't mean to refer to Derrida here. I'm thinking of a recent letter to The Globe and Mail by Sky Gilbert about, as the Globe framed it, "the portrayal of gay men in Mark A. Wainberg's July 26 Three for Thought about HIV/AIDS, saying that it's a typical story from the white, heterosexual AIDS research establishment. Wainberg replies that the facts speak for themselves."

Wainberg wrote that promiscuity among gay males was the primary factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS. Gilbert called this "moral panic." Wainberg replied with, "Several studies have shown ...."

My interest here is not in the conflict over the spread of HIV/AIDS. What interested me was that Gilbert chose to respond to the conflict by referencing and quoting Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Gilbert argued that researchers are blinded by the framework of their language associations, which is leading them down the wrong path, just as the prosecutors of Oscar Wilde destroyed beauty by being blinded by their stark, barren aestheticism.

Gilbert's own words:

But the homosexual/AIDS meganarrative - like all meganarratives - while terrifically seductive, only resembles the truth. Not all people who get AIDS are libertines, and not all learn redemption. North American (mainly white and heterosexual) AIDS scientists - somewhat overzealously, I think - analyze "lifestyles" and collect data about the sex lives of gay men and Africans, meanwhile convincing everyone that their lurid invasions into the privacy of their subjects is about saving lives. But is it merely a coincidence that a transhistorical fear of same-sex desire between males and the Western obsession with colonizing Africa have merged to become a single discourse called The War on AIDS? Even if scientists were to find out conclusively that white heterosexual North Americans are models of monogamy, attempts by crusading colonizers to teach the rest of the world abstinence are historically doomed to failure. Human beings are sexual (which sometimes means promiscuous) and even an evangelical devotion to transforming the aberrant sexualities of mankind will not change that - or the course of this disease. Non-judgmental, factual information based on conclusive scientific evidence can, has and will.

Wainberg said in response, the statistics speak for themselves. Words need not apply.

Words. Numbers. Reality. Truth. Beauty. Lies. Danger. This conflict raises suggestions about how to read Brother Dumb. In short, we need not look to the life of J.D. Salinger or suppose the Gilbert is writing about him. This is not a biography. It is a work of imagination that intersects with reality, a kind of counter-life.

It's true subject may be, in the end, language itself. The novel's narrator often discusses the writing process and how writing is his substitue for interacting with other people. Does language lead toward insight and higher reality, or just an alternate, risky dimension?