This novel is related in coarse, blunt and wired language: the darker vocabularies we hold back. It’s a hard book to talk about in a family newspaper. One feels like Norman Mailer coerced into using the fig-leaf term “fug” in “The Naked and the Dead,” or the street gang member in “West Side Story” who shouts at Officer Krupke, “Krup you!” I suppose you could call James’s language slang, which Carl Sandburg described as “language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” But hands are not what is spat upon here.
It’s hard to talk about this novel, too, because there are at least two dozen ways to pick it up.
It’s about colonialism and tops and bottoms; about how pop culture, especially music, can upend lives; about violence, pity, disgust, shame, exile and revenge; about the nature of Jamaica and its killing lack of irony; about fathers and sons, gay literature and gay feeling; about the power, at times, of submission and about who gets plowed in this world and who does the plowing. It’s about rejection by family and society. It’s about how the Bible legitimized gay pulverization.
It’s also an AIDS novel, a book about dying alone. (The disappearing acts of gay men are one of the title’s many meanings.) We follow one urbane Jamaican man named Havelock Titus back in time to Oxford University, where he studied and became a sexual chew toy for a set of patrician cads. He speaks of “malice” in old dining halls. He was at the doomed rehearsal and is ashamed that he ran away. He was an early AIDS patient. He recalls the days when a man could get hacked to death for wearing eye shadow.
This novel doesn’t have a saccharine bone in its body, but a native sweetness slips through. One narrator thinks, “Nobody told him that wanting to be held and kissed and thought of was a human thing, not just a woman thing. Nobody has told a single man or woman in this country. Nobody told me.”
Ideas matter in a work of fiction, but if a book isn’t alive, they count for naught. What follows are a few observations about what it’s like to tumble around inside “The Disappearers.” One Jamaican narrator latches on to what he can of bubble-butt American culture, in escape from his life’s thin realities. There’s a thunderous ode to the glory of Bruce Springsteen’s glutes (“right above the crack will be a patch of sweat in a perfect V”), and dreams of a scenario in which Don Johnson, Pierce Brosnan and Mark Harmon are engaged with different parts of the narrator’s anatomy. I could parse this motormouth material for pages. Some kid is always ecstatically rubbing one out.
