Temple Slave

Usually books that know how smart they are get on my nerves. As a reader, I'm all non-fiction and fluffy-escapist summer novels. Maybe that's why I love this book -- it's something in between, with humor, wit, and images so vivid, I read and re-read passages. It's never overdrawn, always genuine, and a glimpse into a time in the world that I'd known nothing about (having been born about a two decades too late to enjoy it) from other than an intellectual perspective. But Patrick's novel makes me wish I were there...

"Simon, set the way-back machine for the Sixties." But unlike so many nostalgic wallows, Robert Patrick's coy fictionalization of life at "Cafe Buono" based on his very real life experiences at the grounbreaking Cafe Cino delightfully recapture tumultous, hilarious and touching times. Written in the form of a correspondence to a compatriot in the Off-Off Broadway theatrical revolution he co-founded, its a love letter to us all, gay and straight and every wonderful shade in between. Think of what a "This Is Your Life" segment would be like if Oscar Wilde hosted it....

I was totally taken with this story of the birth of performance art and off-off Broadway. Robert Patrick appears to be writing a novel in Temple Slave (the names have been changed to protect the innocent, so to speak) but in fact gives a wonderfully angry, sweet, sad, touching, detailed and often thrilling account of his experiences as a writer, performer and gay man in New York in the 60s. There's also tons of sex but so what, if Edmund White can do it (re: THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY) why can't Robert Patrick? And if you've ever questioned the value of Warhol and Pop Art you will be as tickled as I was to find that you are not alone.