STOMPING ON THE SUSTAIN PEDAL
a book review of Forrest Muelrath's The Valeries
The Valeries. Forrest Muelrath. Expat Press, 2024.
My hero when it comes to reviewing books was John Updike, and paraphrasing Updike, when reviewing a book you should never punish it for not doing what it never intended to do. Make sure you are reviewing the book as it is, and not some idealized version of the book that has more to with you and your contingent dissatisfactions.
The trouble is, I am not a good book reviewer. My pacing is awful. My responsiveness to the realities of book publishing is such that I struggle to eke out a book review on time. I left behind newspaper reporting a while ago, and writing book reviews, in certain circumstances, is like a species of newspaper reporting: the deadline looms large like a castrating medusa. Worse, ironically, if you make your own deadline, footloose and fancy-free. My conscience torments me. I’m not integrally the same person at these three crucial points of the timeline: the moment I agree to write the book review, the moment I read the book, and the moment I come to write the review. It’s all contingent, and I both fear the reader knowing this, and not knowing this. My ambitions as a reviewer had one shape in the past when I accepted the task, then I read a book and, under a unique pressure, my ambitions underwent a dramatic distortion. I choked. It happens. It’s happened a handful of times in the past and bridges with writers were charred and weakened if not burnt to ashes.
The Valeries by Forrest Muelrath, which I carefully reread twice, dissatisfied me. It’s difficult when a reader can see a vision for the first half of the novel, but the book doesn’t fulfill that vision. As a debut novel we have to take it easy and understand that certain lessons maybe have yet to be learned. What lessons, specifically, you may be asking? For me I think my reading pleasure was interrupted by the tone of the book, and how it handled the tricky issue of humor.
The book was funny, but it needed to be twice as funny. This problem, I found, manifested in several dimensions. It was intellectual but needed to be twice as intellectual. It was sexy but needed to be twice as sexy. The narrator, Glenn the Grief Counselor, retreats to his basement to self-soothe by fiddling with synthesizers, and I couldn’t help but feel that, like his protagonist, Muelrath would have benefited from twiddling knobs and dialing up the amplitude of his novel’s humor, erudition, heat. In short, the novel needed to double down on itself.
The Valeries is an epistolary novel, taking the shape of messages and emails, as the middle-aged grief counselor Glenn writes to “Jules,” a US politician who has been carrying on a ruinous sexual relationship with Glenn’s crossdressing college student son who goes by the nom de drag of Valerie. The son has been debauched to the point of catatonia, and Glenn’s family is rent apart as his wife has left the household on a desperate escape to the Grand Canyon. Jules is threatened with blackmail from several angles. Glenn has access via Valerie’s laptop to the communications between Valerie and Jules, and he peppers the narrative with this incriminating correspondence. A bit of comedy develops where Jules, before ever meeting to transact his troubling affair on a physical plane, is trying to arrange for online payment in exchange for Valerie’s erotic writing. Through successive emails, a running gag all too familiar to intergenerational trysts in our time develops—one party’s ineptitude with tech as they try to prove their ardor and steer their partner into bed. Such a joke wouldn’t have been out of place on the frightening message boards and online exchanges of Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, but that novel created ample space for comic relief to craftily puncture the dread. Here, the joke was teased, good instincts, but could have been pressed one or two more times. Likewise the detail with Glenn puzzling over Valerie’s email signoff “<3” as an arcane reference to less than three. Such instances of clever byplay surfaced once and then never returned.
The primary source of comedy in the book came from the stumbling diction and tone of Glenn’s outraged monologue. Opening the book at random:
I am attempting to pry the salacious slices of your person shared with this so-called Valerie from the very hands that could ruin your family as well as mine, by publishing this potential blackmail material and hiding it in plain sight in such a way that could never ever be attributed to you, Jules.
My son’s femboy pornography production company was not activated until you arrived, Jules.
Elsewhere, Glenn describes himself as a “glum cloud hovering over my son’s maniacal sex parade, whereas you provided the marching band, float, and flowers, Jules.” Muelrath mined this motherlode of tin until it was empty but then kept trying to extract precious resources from it. This painted the main character into a corner, tonally. The persona of a grieving grief counselor became a one-note piano (or synthesizer) keyboard. To be fully effective, a novel composed of comic riffs needs more dynamism and range, less stomping on the sustain panel.
First novels could be experiments, or throat clearings, or soundings of depths newly entered. Muelrath displayed spine and grit in cold-calling with a zany sex comedy his first time out. I’m sorry it took so long to respond to the book but I was wrestling with what to say and how to say it.
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I had a little wisp of nothing published here. It was a selection of text from the same work that you’ve been reading from if you’ve been tuning in over the past couple months. Expat Press gave a home to what is probably the most uncomfortable thing I’ve written and published so far.
I also had my short story collection reviewed at the awesome Patreon website called Ryan C’s Four Color Apocalypse. He reviews mainly comics, as the title suggests, but he’s branching out into indie lit of the variety written by David Kuhnlein, Gary Shipley, Dennis Cooper, Audrey Szasz, and, amazingly, myself! It’s behind a paywall so I won’t violate that by publishing excerpts, but go check out his website. He has a discerning eye. I’ve sent him my two novels and a mess of comics I created when I was being foolish, so there’s a chance he may talk about those too.
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I’m reading up on Yukio Mishima, the Japanese novelist and playwright. I’m about four years behind the readership fad in many ways. Which feels like its own kind of freshness to me, a reverse freshness. Here are two reviews I wrote clipped from Goodreads, of two Mishima’s related books.
FORBIDDEN COLORS. Yukio Mishima.
A very sensitive and crafty novel. This was my first Mishima book but it won’t be my last. So many modulations of relationships, homosexual and heterosexual, between young and old, men and women, were explored with great delicacy and humanity. As a “documentary” about the gay underworld of post war Japan it had a lot of sociological value, and as a remarkably suspenseful novel it had a lot to teach aspiring writers. There were many satisfying twists and turns and unexpected developments that kept pages turning. Essentially it was about an aging novelist Shunsuke who wants to take revenge on women who have spurned him, so he sets up a beautiful young man named Yuichi to romance these women and trick them. Yuichi is a good-looking guy and also coming to understand his status as a gay man with hordes of admirers. Like I said, all kinds of interpersonal combinations are tried out for dramatic effect and insights fly off the page. On the back of my copy of the book, the Village Voice is quoted as saying “Mishima was a genius.” I can believe that. It’s exciting to think there’s lots of other books of his yet to read. I have a Mishima bio and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, which is shorter and hopefully will move fast.
MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID. Marguerite Yourcenar.
I give three stars not because this was a particularly deficient book — it was very well written prose-wise — but because my copy from the library was a misprint: sixty pages from the middle were repeats of the first thirty, so the book was horribly incomplete. Funny that it seemed like the missing section retold the plots of Mishima’s tetralogy The Sea of Fertility and who knows what other synopses. I’m actually glad I didn’t read all that because it probably contained egregious spoilers. What was not spoiled, in terms of endings given away, was the narrative of Mishima’s ritual suicide at the end of this 150-page book. His political and spiritual ideals were sketched out in what was probably a perfunctory manner before the attack on the army base, Mishima’s speech and his seppuku. Interesting conjectures that, as a new reader of Mishima and a Westerner foreign to Japanese culture, I don’t understand well enough to put forward as facts: some notion that one motive for Mishima’s suicide was being overlooked for the Nobel Prize in favor of his friend Kawabata, and the concept that (I’m bastardizing this dreadfully, I’m sure) love was impossible in this post-war Japan since the Emperor had renounced his deity status after the war, and a triangle needs three sides (two lovers and the Emperor). That may be Marguerite Yourcenar’s concoction. I’m an utter amateur but it has a stench of Westernizing grotesquerie. Maybe this is accurate, who knows. Motives for suicide, true deep motives, seem indecipherable to the survivors. I want to read more of the fiction and learn about the man’s soul that way.