Thursday, May 25, 2006



What We Do Is Secret

by Kief Hillsbery

I almost never do this, but I'm not going to finish a book I've started.

Even though I'm a fan of the genre (gay Bildungsroman), and even though one of the author's previous novels (War Boy) has been recommended to me by two friends, I didn't pick this up when I first saw it. The back-cover description didn't catch my interest. I decided to read it when someone else told me it's about Darby Crash, a punk rocker who was afraid to come out of the closet — and I also heard the story's being made into a movie.

Well, however great the story may be, I was only able to force myself through a few chapters. It's narrated in a stream-of-consciousness-cum-free-association style that I found absolutely irritating and impossible. I mean, post modernism is so last millennium, right? (Actually, I enjoy Virginia Woolf, and I've written some free-associative verse, so maybe it was just the combination of the two — or the failure to combine them artfully.)

Anyway, I give up.


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