Review: "Sweet and Low" by Nick White

Author Nick White made an auspicious debut last year with his gothic infused debut novel of gay identity How to Survive A Summer. It is a rich and textured look at one man’s reckoning with his past that effortlessly melds the past with the present, the grotesque with it’s emotional weight and the scary and the heartbreaking, But as good as that book is, it is surpassed greatly by his first collection of short stories, Sweet and Low. From the first page it is easy to see that Nick White is a Southern writer, with his eloquent descriptions of people places and things that are either beautiful, perverse or somewhere in the middle. And like most writers from the South, his feelings about his homeland are chaotic, recognizing both the history of his homeland and the ugliness that it upheld, participated in and was responsible for. And with the added layer of human sexuality, these stories straddle the good and the bad, the gross and pleasant in creepy and profound ways. Like I do with all short story collections, I will pick out my favorites, and with a collection like this, that is going to be very difficult. Divided up into two sections, that could be looked at separately if they were published as so, the first section, titled Heavenly Bodies features four stories that are unrelated. The first one, “The Lovers” concerns a widow who hosts a podcast and the young man who was her doctor husband’s lover. It intertwines both stories, highlighting their ignorance but coming together to tell a full story about both of the hurt they suffered from their careless mate. “Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin”, the shortest story in the 290-page collection, sees a man fall off his lawnmower and get stuck underneath it, only to be taunted by a nearby snake who he is convinced is either the ghost of his abusive father or revenge for disowning his gay son. “These Heavenly Bodies”, the highlight of the collection, sees a teenaged boy whose reacting to his mother’s deaths by acting out violently and taking painting lesson. This all changes when a pair of female conjoined twins shows up in town and he is tasked with painting their portrait. It is a wonderful tale of forbidden desire, brutal rejection and devastating betrayal with a visceral ending as ambiguous as it is tragic. The next section, titled The Exaggerations, follow the character of Forney Culpepper, who may or may not be a surrogate for the author himself since he is a writer. Since only one of the stories is from his perspective (the wonderful “The Exaggerations), the image of Forney is a bit murky and that is too the book’s benefit. He is the sad-eyed son of his unreliable musician mother in the title story, the friend to a lost, bulky college freshman in “Break” and a paranoid, bird hunting writer father in “The Last of His Kind.” Together, these two sections make for a great study in secrets, confusion, sadness and the ever-long search for meaning in life from a burgeoning writer who is at the start of what I hope is a prosperous career.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "How to Survive a Summer" by Nick White

How To Survive a Summer, the debut novel by author Nick White is one of three books (two of which are translations) this year by gay male authors that deal heavily with homosexual themes. Besides the subject matter, I am not too sure if these books have anything more in common (I will be reading one of them next month), but they have a hard act to follow since this is an astonishingly self-assured debut that hopelessly and proudly straddles many different genres while maintaining its vice like grip on the reader, even through it’s quieter more reflective moments. What I liked most about this book is how much deeper it goes than just being a book about homosexuality. It has sex scenes in it, it has what might pass for love in it (I will elaborate), but it’s epicenter is its’ broken, almost cowardly narrator, a man-child nearing 30 who can’t reckon with his past and who he is, and most certainly can’t focus on the future. And the whole book is leading toward the possible moment when he can come to terms with who he is, what he went through and where he wants to be, and placing that story within the confines of what is at times a thriller makes for an endlessly compelling 338 page book. The man-child in question is Will Dillard, a grad student in film theory at an unnamed Midwestern college. One day, a friend of his, Bevy, invites him to a protest of an upcoming slasher film, which is based on book about a brutal gay conversion camp in Mississippi, which closed down after one of the campers was killed. What no one knows is that will was one of the five campers there during that fateful summer. After trying to see the movie with Zeus, a female to male transgender person and possible love interest, Will flees the college and heads back to where he grew up and eventually, the camp where his life took a harrowing turn. The novel doesn’t spend the bulk of its time in camp; instead, we get glimpses at Will’s childhood in the South, where kindness masks a social rigidity that is immovable and the wilderness provides cover for things otherworldly and dangerous. We learn about Will’s mother, who first noticed his homosexuality during a sleepless night following one of Will’s bad dreams. His dad, a local preacher, has a different way of finding out, which plays out in a raunchy scene involving a church candle. How he comes to be a camper I will not spoil, nor will I spoil what happens when he runs into two former campers on his trip who have become a couple and are hiding more than their share of secrets. This is a thrilling yet sad novel of a man who can’t get over himself and what he is, and the consequences that await him when he runs from that truth. It is a powerful original story from a writer to watch.

Rating: 5/5