Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Hard
by Wayne Hoffman
Carroll & Graf
How to order

Wayne Hoffman's debut novel Hard, is a knockout. Not just because it is so good, and so witty, funny, sexy, and intelligent. But because it brings us back to a type of gay fiction writing that's become rarer and rarer. This is a serious, literary novel about gay life. In the late 1970s, 80s, and into the early 90s, the literary novel was plentiful. Authors such as Christopher Bram, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Alan Hollinghurst-- all of whom are still writing and being read now-- started their careers. But there were plenty of other novelists-- American and British from both large and small publishers-- who turned out smart, insightful and literary work: Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist (1985,) Melvin Dixon's Trouble the Waters (1989) and Vanishing Rooms (1991), Paul Russell's Boys of Life (1990), David Rees In the Tent (1979) Patrick Gale's Kansas in August (1988) and Little Bits of Baby (1990), Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990), Adam Mars-Jones's The Waters of Thirst (1994). All of these books found a very receptive readership.

View our poll archive

As the market for gay novels grew so did the readership for genre- and light fiction: "boylit," the equivalent of "chicklit." Christian McLaughlin's Sex Toys of the Gods (1998) Timothy James Beck's It Had to Be You (2001), Ben Tyler's Tricks of the Trade (2002), Blair Mastbaum's Clay's Way (2004), Jon Jeffrey's Boyfriend Material (2004), Tom Dolby's Trouble Boy (2004), Scott Pomfret & Scott Whittier's Razor Burns (2005). Nothing wrong with any of these-- some of them, the best of the genre are quite entertaining and enjoyable. But in the past decade publishers have been shying away from more serious gay fiction.

Reading Hard reminds us that the important, strong, and vital gay novel is still with us. Hard is many things-- an urban comic novel, a panorama of AIDS-inflected New York in the late 1990s, a Jewish novel (think Woody Allen meets ACT UP), a political fantasia in which good and evil (i.e., sex and state repression) battle it out at JO parties and clubs, and finally-- as Christopher Bram notes in his blurb for the novel-- "a comic-strip-of-a-novel about the way gay men live now." This isn't to suggest that Hard is unfocused or sloppy-- Hoffman has a fine, pungent writing style that always hits home and delivers honest emotion. But rather that it covers so wide a variety of themes, textures, feelings, and milieu that it's impossible to really successfully classify it in a specific genre. But Bram's "comic strip" metaphor comes closest to an accurate description, capturing both the barbed energy and the quirky, often quiet, subversiveness of the book.

The gay New York that Hoffman paints as Hard's backdrop is a city in flux. The AIDS epidemic is still raging but there are now some drugs that work, many gay men are rediscovering a vibrant sexual culture while others are doing their best-- through fear and repression-- to stamp it out. Fire Island social life is booming, while gay artists and writers in Manhattan can hardly find work to support themselves. In the center of the carnivalesque maelstrom are Moe Perl-man, a 30-something writer, activist, and "the greatest cocksucker in New York City," and his emblematic archenemy, Frank deSoto, a late-40s former club promoter, now newspaper publisher and playwright, who, deeply grieving over loss of his lover, has taken it upon himself to shut down all venues of public sex and frighten gay men into celibacy or monogamy.

Even as its major themes are love and death, the cultural clash between sex and repression, the action of Hard is minimal, not catastrophic: intra-community fights, relationships beginning and breaking up, AIDS fundraisers, meeting the new boyfriend's parents, online cruising. These are the daily incidents and minutia that makeup urban gay life, but what makes Hard so vital, and moving, is that Hoffman has the wonderful ability as a writer to explicate the extraordinary in the ordinariness of everyday life. The battle that is at the center of Hard-- the never-ending fight for personal and sexual integrity in a culture that constantly demeans personhood and sexuality-- is enormous. While Hoffman never loses sight of its importance, he is a wise and gifted enough writer to know that this panorama is too Miltonian, too Hieronymus Bosch, to work as anything more than large canvas on which the small figures are most important.

Hard has movement and energy, insights and wonderful epiphanies. But Hoffman is at his strongest when he's simply writing about how the complexities of human sexuality illuminate and define our everyday. While there are characters here whom he clearly likes and dislikes, he is fair to everyone. Moe (for all of his rough charm) has his faults, and Frank (for all of his ill-advised and destructive behavior) manages to be, at times, sympathetic. But the importance of Hard is that it vividly and movingly captures what it means to be an urban gay man living in the last decade of the 20th century, when everything looked so bleak and yet so bright at the same time.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com