Richard Rodriguez’s Multitudes

Pico Iyer marvels at the breadth and constant surprises of the gay Catholic Richard Rodriguez’s writing, noting that while his latest book, Darling, ostensibly is about religion, “it’s a central feature of his thinking that nothing—not even loneliness—is ever considered in isolation”:

[E]ven as the book with the ceremonial Catholic title Days of Obligation kept on referring to sex, so his new one, which purports to be about the desert monotheisms, calls itself Darling. Sometimes such gestures may strike readers as a bit much, but to his credit, Rodriguez does not try to link earthly and heavenly love as John Donne does, or to blend them with the abandoned ease of the Islamic high priest of Californian fashion, Rumi. Nor does he follow the familiar path of a gay believer wondering why the religion he serves so faithfully is ready to exile him for his sexual preferences.

Rather, this unpredictable maverick throws all his variegated interests into the mix and lets the sparks fly.

He’s irreverent even toward the objects of his reverence—“Is God dead?” he sincerely asked in his first book—and grave about those issues (computer technology) that others might be flip about. When fondly recalling the Sisters of Mercy who educated him, he suddenly turns to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of gay drag queens whose wild impiety he’d once written against. Now, however, as he watches them rattle cans for charity and jolly along some homeless teenagers, he has to concede that good works can make even the most outrageous poses irrelevant.

Darling begins by asserting that it will address the world in the wake of September 11 and try to bring the writer’s Catholicism into a better relation with its desert brother Islam. Happily, it soon abandons that somewhat rote mission for a much more ungovernable and unassimilable wander across everything from the decline of the American newspaper to the debate over gay marriage, from Cesar Chavez to the world of camp… Rodriguez throws off a constant fireworks display of suggestions and reveals more in an aside than others do in self-important volumes. As you read, you notice how often Don Quixote keeps recurring, and death notices, and meditations on the “tyranny of American optimism,” each one gaining new power with every recurrence, and reminding us of how the pursuit of happiness leaves us sad. The overall mosaic is far more glittering than any of its parts.

Previous Dish on Darling here, here, and here. Check out my Deep Dish conversation with Richard about the book here.