Bruiser

"Bruiser" is the sort of book I usually hate but it was so well done I liked it in spite of myself. It is a love story, but very low key, told in that sort of flatfooted tone that some critics call "K-Mart realism." It concerns a British importer living in Chicago who meets a young amateur boxer, who winds up living with him.The two men struggle through the necessary adaptations of living together such as conflicting schedules and HIV status. They plan (although "plan" is perhaps too firm a verb) a motor trip to South America but don't make it past Texas. The setting for the second half of the book is depressing but what redeems it is the obvious love the men feel for each other even though we never hear "I love you." In other words, this book is so well told that we readers feel the two men's affection for each other and how it motivates their actions without string-pulling. As a Chicago resident, I can certainly say that the Chicago locales were well rendered. Overall "Bruiser" is a good job, and I look for further works from this author.

House performs at least a couple of feats of magic with this novel. First of all he has written a love story in which neither character says, "I love you" to the other. Such declaration is unnecessary. The reader knows, through their actions, how Paul and Adrian feel about each other. Such is the true novelist's craft, to show rather than merely tell. Secondly, House has made effective use of present tense narration. I usually abhor this point of view for its pretensiousness, but this time it doesn't detract from the flow or interest of the story.House has taken what could easily become maudlin and made it moving and believable.

This world that these two main characters live in, although at times depressing and hard to swallow, also kept me up most of the night to finish. I gave this 5 stars because it was well written for all the strange goings on and I felt for the young boxer and the older man, it did touch me and thats why I seek out books like this for. Well worth the time.

This novel, describing the unlikely affair between a 42-year-old expatriate Englishman and an 18-year-old waiter/amateur boxer/occasional rent boy, came as a surprise. The pair meet in Chicago, where the older man, the narrator, is living in a seedy hotel while avoiding his obligation to his family business. One of the great rewards of this novel lies in the narrator's outsider view of American culture, surreal warts and all. (Especially good is the murderer-as-celebrity subplot later in the book.) Another reward is the complete credibility of their relationship: both men--any suggestion of pedophilia is just plain inaccurate--are outsiders for very different reasons; but as their friendship evolves, they begin to understand and care for each other. Though this book is ostensibly a road novel, and the destination is Brazil, most of the action takes place in Chicago and San Antonio; Texas, despite its mythically American significance to the narrator, appears as rainy, dark, muddy, bleak. It is here, though, that both men must reconcile their outsider identity with their need for each other. Their separate journeys and mutual arrival bring the novel's greatest reward: a happy (!) ending. In fact, the book ends with a brilliant, shimmering sunset. Recommended.

Practically everything about this slim novel is fresh. Taking now fairly stale themes in gay fiction (older man/younger man, AIDS anxiety, the Englishman abroad, adventures on the road), House transforms them into something altogether mesmerizing with chiseled prose and twists of plot so convincing and immediate that one sometimes feels like he's reading a private journal. (The writing often reminded me of Denton Welch's journals and short stories.) The book manages to be erotic while avoiding the breathless ecstasies of much romantic writing--the characters are not angelically handsome, not every moment teeters on sexual sublimity, and House rarely relies on abstractions, preferring viscerally concrete details instead. The book is worldly wise, also, without lapsing into preachiness. The world House paints here is grim--full of brutality, abusive stupidity, fear, even criminality--and while doing nothing to contradict this bleak view of things, he also offers glimmers of grace--not divine grace, to be sure, but the musty, sometimes messy grace of human connectedness.