The Whistling Song: A Novel

by Stephen Beachy

Matt, a street-smart but innocent fugitive from an orphanage hitchhikes through 1980's America in search of Andalusia, the babysitter from his lost, idyllic childhood, and comes to understand guilt, responsibility, and the faces of love

Genres: Fiction, LGBT

411 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1991

About the author

Stephen Beachy is a writer. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965. His first novel, The Whistling Song, was published by W. W. Norton with cover illustrations by Curt Kirkwood in 1991 and his second, Distortion, by Harrington Park Press, in 2000. Two novellas, Some Phantom and No Time Flat were published in 2006, from Suspect Thoughts Press. His fiction has been published in BOMB, Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly, SHADE, and various anthologies. He has written literary criticism for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

In October, 2005, he published an article in New York Magazine, exposing the writer JT LeRoy as the concoction of a woman named Laura Albert, with the help of her family members.

Beachy teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.

Beachy is also a second cousin of biologist Philip Beachy and historian Robert Beachy.

Reviews

[Craven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. It could very well be the best book that I've read in ten years. It's all in here. Sex and Death. Good and Evil. Black and White. The promise and theft of the American Dream.
Every passage in here is to be read slowly and lingered over. Each intense and powerful. It brings up images of the American outlaw, the rambler, the individualist. The main character, Matt, is Huckleberry Finn, Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie all mixed up in the mind of an orphan, conflicted and scarred yet with a beautiful and ultimately altruistic soul. Not unlike many of the weird, down-trodden and seeking folks that he meets as he crosses back and forth on the highways of America, Nam vets, UFO nuts, philosophy spewing bag ladies, etc.
It goes deep inside the mind of people suffering from great loss, abuse and hardship and deals with stuff like Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in such a subtle and legitimate way that I feel like an idiot using such a clunky term to describe it here.
This book deals with the entire American mental and physical landscape. Overstating it to the fantastical, only to make it all the more real. Reminding the reader of the first time they took off on the open road and everything was voluminous and life altering.
This is far and away the most underrated book I've ever read. So don't screw up and pass it up.

*P.S This was the review I had posted on Amazon after I read it a year ago. Now I would go as far as to say that it is probably the best novel ever I've ever read. When my copy gets back to me I'll probably be tempted to read it again.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK, I love "first novels," even when the writers don't necessarily go on to fame and glory. Stephen Beachy's "The Whistling Song" was brilliant, and conflicted, and disturbing in many ways, and also funny and lyrical and powerful. Beachy's fame as a writer came from the unmasking of JT Leroy, a supposedly sexually abused young author who turned out to be the work of a middle-aged woman. But I strongly recommend this first work of fiction, for all the complex issues of identity it exposes, that will absorb Beachy in many ways through his career. A brilliant writer in his first gallop out of the gate.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sad/funny/realistic and utterly compelling road novel full of keen insights into the loopy depravity that constitutes modern American culture. I loved it!

[Yvonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 15 years ago this was my favorite book

[Isabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, right from the start, Freud is already laughing from his grave.

I would've given this book 3 stars, had the physical book itself not been so nice. I just love a well bound book, call me silly. I don't care.

Anywho onto the plot. Who really cared about having a linear plot line anyway? Thus, the book follows a very vague of a timeline jam packed with short stories and memories.

One thing though that I did enjoy was the whole plot twist that was the ending. The irony of a white gay man being in love with an idealistic image of a black lesbian. Matt really should've just stayed with Jimmy instead of chasing a Freudian fantasy.

But what makes it great is that the book becomes increasingly self-aware in the finale of the book, which you don't often.

And yet despite this, I dislike the comfortablity the book has on dropping slurs willy nilly. Sure, it could be chalked up to "that's how it was back in the day," doesn't make it better.

Overall, if you want to read a book that replicates what it's like to be driving down a desert highways, 80s rock blasting through the radio, windows rolled down, and the air heady with weed and cigarette smoke; and then to be splashed witn sobering cold water. Then this is the book for you.

3/5 for story, 4/5 bc the book is bound so nicely. I do judge a book by its cover.

[Marcel Côté · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was a perfect revelation through the first quarter, still brilliant throughout the next half, and then took a wrong turn near the end, trying to do too much and tripping into incoherence while trying to force a resolution, or a revelation that would explain all possibilities. Still, the sheer poetry and insight of what came before, a kaleidescope of crazed and marginalized America — which is to say, the America where most of us spend our lives — and Beachy's subversively humanist vision in rendering it make the final missteps forgiveable.

This novel from the late 1980s deserves to be a candidate for the Great American Novel of its generation. It perfectly captures the spirit of its times, the Reagan years — the innocence and the rot, the vanishing sense of community, the lies people told themselves to survive, the stubborn hunger for truth. I'm glad Beachy got it all down. Beachy apparently did quite a bit of hitchhiking and margin-living himself as a young man, and the authenticity shows. This sadly underrated, overlooked work deserves to be far more widely read, debated, discussed.

[Josephine McCormick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Within pages, assumed this was the inspiration for one of my favorite films, Gus Van Sant's 1991 My Own Private Idaho. The novel's precious wandering dreamer of a narrator, Matt, I thought a well-matched basis for River Phoenix's sleepy Mike; the sinister charismatic love interest of Jimmy Keanu Reeves' alluring Scott; the idle quest for Andulusia morphed into a search for a different original mommy, and still a metaphor/vessel for belonging and purpose and emergence from childhood. Sounds trite, I'm aware, but undoubtedly one of the most compelling and original queer novels I've yet encountered. A response to Ginsberg's Howl? An early-90s iteration of Neal and Jack? Another offering for this fantastic absurd American voice I relish, dripping with bisexuality, creative word smashing, lusty dusty roadsides, filth, the only books one can and should read stoned in the bathtub, ice cream turning frothy on the toilet lid?

[Djrmel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matt is orphaned as a young boy when his parents are brutally murdered while he's out running his paper route. That might be the single clear plot point in this novel. The rest of the book is Matt's journey to find the woman who baby-sat him before his parents were killed, the woman he believes will make everything all right. Told in a not quite linear form, we go through Matt's two terms in the same orphanage; his time living on the streets with Jimmy, a boy he will do anything for to keep in his life; and all kinds of interesting folks that pick him up as he hitchhikes alone across the United States. At times very surreal, at other times very earthy, it's a different kind of "journey is the destination" story. It's almost always funny, though, because despite what he's exposed to, Matt tries to remain optimistic.

[Alika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very entertaining and deep, philosophical, covered so many topics--existential, religion, drugs, mysticism, anorexia, sex, vanishing, corporate America, etc. A multiple cross-country "Huck Finn" roadtrip from hell. Sort-of. Some of the things that Matt thought and talked about were things I'd thought about before too. And what a cast of characters!

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

dennis cooper light

[The Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizarre Southern gothic road trip fantasy? (I remember reading this aloud to my sister and having to edit out a whole handjob scene.)

[Bruce Holbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

funny, heartbreaking, original!