jmc_bks

Today's SBD shall not be a bitch but a squee about a book I enjoyed.

ePistols at Dawn is the third Z.A. Maxfield book I've read, the first two being St. Nacho's (discussed here) and Crossing Borders (mentioned here). I've since read Blue Fire and have the short story in Because of the Brave TBR.

Choose your weapons.

Jae-sun Fields is pissed. Someone has taken the seminal coming-out, coming-of-age novel Doorways and satirized it. He’s determined to use his Internet skills and his job as a tabloid reporter to out the author as the fraud and no-talent hack he’s sure she is.

Kelly Kendall likes his anonymity and, except for his houseboy, factotum and all-around slut, Will, he craves solitude. There’s also that crippling case of OCD that makes it virtually impossible for him to leave the house. He’s hidden his authorship of Doorways behind layers of secrets and several years’ worth of lies—until he loses a bet.

Satirizing his own work, as far as he can see, is his own damned prerogative. Except now he has an online stalker, one who always seems several steps ahead of him in their online duel for information.

A chance meeting reveals more than hidden identities—it exposes a mutual magnetic attraction that can’t be denied. And pushes the stakes that much higher, into a zone that could get way too personal…

I loved so much about this book. I loved the play on words and repeated use of windows and doors as metaphors and puns. For example, when talking about being a good/bad relationship bet, Kelly says his life has some major bugs/flaws that may be too much. Jae’s response:

I’m Jae-Sun Fields version 1.0. I may even be the beta test version. And if you take into consideration that the support team for my software are all non-native English speakers who will chase you down the street with a broom if you tell them my programming might be faulty? I’m no Windows Vista.

I particularly loved the characters, who came alive on the page. I loved that the two of them began their courtship via email, even as one tried to stay anonymous and the other was sure his correspondent was a woman (totally not his type).

Jae is a curious man. He wants to know everything…as he says himself when he has alienated Kelly by asking questions,

I have to know everything I can find out. I like to glean information from a recalcitrant source. It’s like lifting the corner of a Band-Aid, or peeling off a bit of wallpaper that has come unstuck. It’s a compulsion.

Kelly, on the other hand, is a bundle of idiosyncrasies, beginning with OCD and mild agoraphobia, and ending with his carefully constructed privacy via a maze of pseudonyms. He’s Kelly Mackay in real life, who is also Kelly Maxwell, screenwriter of some success, Kelly Kendall, author of Windows, a porny homage to Doorways, and Kieran Andrews, the almost anonymous author of Doorways. As Jae observes, Kelly is “a grab bag of phobias and disorders that made a date with him like a minefield.” But Jae still finds him attractive in a totally adorkable way.

Even the secondary characters are distinct. Will, Kelly’s best friend, is a twink who could organize an army with his own bundle of issues, primarily related to belonging and family, particularly the family that Kelly gives him. One secondary character never even appears on the page but is a huge catalyst for all of the action and conflict in the book: Hunter Leighton, a closeted gay actor, commits suicide after being outed by a tabloid, The Adversary. His death pushes Jae (who dated him briefly before he was outed) into more examination of what he does professionally, working for a tabloid that outs gay celebrities and politicians. His death also shatters Will – the relationship there is murky, dating back to Will’s rent boy days – and brings Kelly into real life contact with Jae at the funeral.

Actually, I’m a bit curious about Jae’s conflict with the raison d’etre of The Adversary and would’ve liked to see more of it on the page, especially with respect to his reporting. The articles mentioned are book reviews, which makes me wonder what other reporting he does.

At heart, this is a sweet (and hot) love story between two men who screw up and make mistakes and then forgive each other and try to move on. But it also includes a fundamental conflict about privacy: who has the “right to know”? What do they have the right to know? What does one have the right to keep private? Does an author (or artist of any sort) give up the right to anonymity simply because s/he has created a work that others view as seminal?

The conflict occurs on a couple of levels, and I struggled with my reactions as a reader to different events in the book. First because Jae is pissy about the parody and intends to crush the chick who dissed his favorite book. He knew who Kelly was when they first went out –knew he wasn’t a she, but kept emailing under his screen name SberryFields- which seemed fundamentally dishonest and vaguely stalkerish to me. He knew he was being dumb even as he did it, got caught, and had to deal with the consequences.

And second, because The Adversary’s mission is outing gay celebrities. The editor gave a reasonable defense, casting it in terms of politicians and actors hiding as straight men and persecuting gays while playing with rent boys after hours, but I still found the idea of a magazine with outing as a goal to be persecutory.

At one point, when Jae and Kelly are arguing about the revelation of Kelly’s identity as Kieran Andrews, Jae says,

You wrote a book. For twenty years it’s been on the shelves, printed and reprinted and every damned time someone buys it, they drop a coin in your basket. If you didn’t want people to read it? If you didn’t want it to make any kind of difference to anyone but you? You should have locked it in your diary and left it in your fucking desk drawer. But you didn’t do that and because I’m a reporter I have to ask myself – and eventually you – why.

My problem with this attitude is one that was addressed briefly over at Romancing the Blog last week, when Sarah Tanner asked about reader expectations of authors. Here’s the thing: publishing an amazing book does not give a reader or a report the right to know anything about him that he chooses not to share. Frankly, choosing to never again publish under that name and burying his identity made it clear he wasn’t interested in being anyone’s poster child. Hunting him down by hacking the money trail can’t be cast as anything other than invasive and offensive (to me, YMMV). Jae’s attitude of ownership and obligation toward Doorways and its author bothered me. In terms of the relationship between them, it made me wonder where the privacy line would be drawn between the two of them in the future: what has to be shared vs. what is private, even in terms of couplehood.

Ultimately, this book made me stop and think not just about the characters but the larger issues that created their conflict. Plus, it included some hot boy on boy action (well, more man on man, given their ages) and funny dialogue.

B+ from me, my new favorite Maxfield book.

Random snark: I get the Archie Goodwin and film noir feel for Jae, and that it works for Kelly…but men should not wear pleated pants. No one should. Stacy London says so. Just sayin’.