The Mount Monadnock Blues
Larry Duberstein
The publication of his 1998 novel, The Handsome Sailor, brought Larry Duberstein critical praise for his ability to capture period details in prose. That book, a fictional examination of the psyche of author Herman Melville was set in 1882. Now, with The Mt. Monadnock Blues, Duberstein has applied his acute psychological insight and eye for verisimilitude to the creation of another period piece. Revelatory and disturbing, The Mt. Monadnock Blues is a perfectly preserved time capsule disinterred from the loose soil of the not-so-distant past. Setting his action in 1990, Duberstein unearths a social world that feels so close, yet so far away. The Mt. Monadnock Blues will make you grateful for the ways in which cultural attitudes toward gay men have changed over the past decade and a half. It may also remind readers how much we take our liberties for granted.
The novel begins with death. State Troopers arrive at the Boston apartment of forty-year-old travel agent Tim Bannon. Bannon's eight-year-old niece and eleven-year- old nephew are in tow. (Reflexively, Tim wonders if he's about to be saddled with child abuse charges, as if COPS + KIDS + GAY MAN is a standard cultural formula for molestation). As it turns out, Tim's older sister Jill and her husband have been killed in a car accident and "Unk" Tim has been named in loco parentis, according to wishes set out in his sibling's will.
Were The Mt. Monadnock Blues set in contemporary America rather than in the ancient history of the Reagan era, this set-up could yield a well-wrought portrait of a new-fangled family, the gay uncle struggling with the unexpected responsibilities of parenthood, the children coming to recognize that sexual orientation matters less in the world than love does. And yes, bits of that sort of story do surface here. But Mt. Monadnock is a much darker—much more blues-inflected—book because author Duberstein is excruciatingly accurate in his so-close but so-far-away period details. The Mt. Monadnock Blues reads like early Steven McCauley transposed into a minor key.
To be frank, this reviewer plunged into the novel without reading the jacket copy. So, until page 32, where the date is first clearly stated in the text, I didn't understand when the story was taking place. I assumed the book was set in the present, and therefore had a lot of trouble feeling any empathy for Tim Bannon. He struck me as terribly unevolved. I hadn't noticed the absence of cell phones, but the presence of self-loathing was glaring. With the AIDS epidemic raging through the gay community—and widely equated with homosexuality—middle-of-the-road Bannon, never the activist, we find middle-of-the-road Bannon resigned to a sort of steadfast low-grade depression. He seriously considers himself to be "approaching the time of his sexual retirement" and frankly believes that "he was gay...therefore he was facing a death sentence, or presumed he was."
That presumption is a key marker of the novel's era. In the pre-cocktail therapy America, having watched friends suffer the horrific side-effects of AZT, Bannon cannot find a good reason to get tested. He also uses a female colleague as a beard at social functions. And hasn't come out to his mother. He is even willing to be represented in the custody battle that follows in the wake of his sister's death by a lawyer who is unabashedly repulsed by his sexuality. This is pre-Domestic Partnerships America, pre-Ellen America, pre-Angels in America. No matter how sub-optimal current conditions may be for gay men, The Mt. Monadnock Blues will remind older readers that they are living in a relative age of enlightenment.
Duberstein is both rigorous and brave in telling his story in a straightahead fashion rather than recounting it in retrospect from the present or bracketing it with a contemporary prologue and epilogue. The result of this approach, however, is a book that may have trouble connecting with readers under the age of 30, who may find the attitudes of Bannon's characters—both gay and straight—to be inscrutably antediluvian. Yes, The Mt. Monadnock Blues is spot-on as a period piece, but it also feels a bit like a museum piece.
What saves the novel from being of only historical interest is Duberstein's fine sense of pacing and his storytelling skills. He keeps the reader turning pages with more plot elements than one naturally expects in a character-driven domestic drama and delivers frequent riffs of enlivening wit. Most importantly, he creates an utterly believable sense of tenderness between the two orphaned children and their beloved hunk-lovin' "Unk." The small scenes of Bannon and the youngsters reaching out to each other in the midst of shared grief and throughout the ungainly process of emotional recovery are indelible in their sensitivity and charm.
The Mt. Monadnock Blues concludes with an uncharacteristically sunny Ozzie and Harriet whopper of a finale that comes may come as a relief to readers but is also a bit hard to swallow. In the book's final turn of events, Duberstein—a veteran of the period he writes about—reveals a sustaining optimism far beyond what his protagonist seems capable of. Capping off a book so shot through with despair, the happy ending seems to belong more to the author than his characters.
