by Brontez Purnell
Hang on to your hats. This is one wild ride.
Oakland-based writer, punk musician and dance-maker abandons the loose, overarching narrative structure of his preceding effort, the novel “As I Lay My Burden Down,” in favor of a more pointillistic technique. The result is…what exactly? Partly a collection of conventional short stories. Partly flash pieces—a catalog of sexual encounters and regrets. Partly hodgepodged memoiristic vignettes that read like autofiction. Go ahead, try and put your finger on it. You can’t.
Whatever it is, it’s pure verbal magic. Accolades abound: New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and many more.
In the short catalog entries, Purnell’s fictive doppelgangers relate their mostly brief relationships in first person narratives. The language is wry, urbane—of the moment—wrapped up with a bow in pithy, ironically comic endings.
The narrator(s) appear to be a lot like Purnell himself—black man, born and raised in Alabama, punk rock musician and all around scene-ster. Or is he? Does it matter? Mattering isn’t relevant. There’s only the body’s compulsive journey, lensed through the mediums of drug-and-alcohol-infused hard partying. And sex. Lots of sex.
Like Purnell and his narrator(s), like so many young men, I gravitated to the Bay Area to revel in the sexual exuberance of my tribe, or as Purnell puts it his “peculiar coven.” It’s a joy to see all that craziness rendered in this book with such precision—the late night prowling the halls at the baths, the caravan of men and naked limbs and aching flesh.
Purnell came up in the punk music scene and much of the language of these short evocations has a similar brash, throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks bravado.
I drink firewater, often and late at night. Double-barrel—like a shotgun—and knock down every evening like a building past its prime making way for the new.
Interspersed between these catalog entries of his run-ins with lovers are longer, more conventional stories told in the third person. They feature characters different from the young, hip black narrator(s) of the short sections—manifestations, perhaps, of earlier stages of Purnell’s life or projections of later ones.
In the touching, “Ed’s Name Written in Pencil” we meet a seven-and-a-half-year-old boy navigating his confused attraction to his bully and benefactor.
In “An Early Retirement” a former actor, now a contract employee on a Northern California pot farm, treads water in middle age.
The young man in “Meandering (Part One)” tries to make sense of his life after a bad breakup.
An elderly gay man with a testosterone deficiency in “Mrs. Raleigh vs. The Gym” has an unsatisfying sexual encounter. As in the other longer stories, the language here is measured and precise. Upon returning to the gym to get his body into shape, the narrator observes:
He pictured all the men he had over the years and the different phases of his body as if they were both moon cycles. But there were no stark conclusions to be made, really—he could never get any man to act right, even when he had muscles.—Page 147
With so much sex going on in these stories, there is surprisingly little specificity about the act. Purnell has no interest in titillation, nor love, really. The word is barely used in the book. Though this does flatten the narrative’s emotional impact somewhat, I understand Purnell’s reason for withholding the smutty parts. Stripped of the choreography of fucking or any romanticism to the encounters, the hook-ups feel part of a larger moment.
The mix of lovers tales fizzles out in, not an ending really, but a travelogue that feels weirdly tacked on. To search for meaning in this cavalcade of sex—to label it, as one might, as sad or tawdry—misses the point. Like a good orgasm, an ejaculation, like life, it just is.
100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell
MCD x FSG Originals, 2021, 192 pp., $20.30
ISBN: 9780374538989
{ Cross-posted at goodreads. }