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Onyx: A Novel
"Striking in its bold depictions of both pleasure and pain; a fresh angle on familiar themes of love and death, and manifesting greater insight in its musings about living."-"Publishers Weekly"
"Incredibly rich and densely textured; highly recommended."-"Library Journal"
Three men. Two gay; one straight.
Two searching for meaning in the face of loss, one searching for the heart of masculinity. What awakens between them will change their lives forever. The narrative-exploring six months in the life of Ray Henriques, a successful Manhattan record producer-unearths a sometimes jolting examination of how loss can awaken dormant desires and postponed dreams. Endings lead to beginnings, appearances do not match reality, and love can harden hearts as surely as it can expand them.
"Incredibly rich and densely textured; highly recommended."-"Library Journal"
Three men. Two gay; one straight.
Two searching for meaning in the face of loss, one searching for the heart of masculinity. What awakens between them will change their lives forever. The narrative-exploring six months in the life of Ray Henriques, a successful Manhattan record producer-unearths a sometimes jolting examination of how loss can awaken dormant desires and postponed dreams. Endings lead to beginnings, appearances do not match reality, and love can harden hearts as surely as it can expand them.
- GenresFictionLGBTGay Fiction
344 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 2001
9 people are currently reading
104 people want to read
About the author
Felice Picano
99 books211 followersFelice Anthony Picano was an American writer, publisher and critic who encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 30, 2019
Polished to a gleam
ONYX is an amazingly fine novel from a writer who seems to grow with each published work. Though many may overlook this latest book as merely another Violet Quill opus chronicling gay life, this book is more than a solid story, more than a beautifully written novel, more than many other books in this genre. This novel is an elegantly written exploration of the quest of the individual in the 21st Century - the immediacy and inexplicable choices that death makes, how individuals deal with genetic agar plates peppered by the vagaries of childhood environments/family history/social mores/chance encounters, why we become puppets of our stage play of id/ego/superego. Picano has created thoroughly 3-dimensional characters who leap off the page as both good and bad acquaintances we've all encountered. There seems to be much autobiographical material here: how else could the author know the complexities of his characters unless he'd lived in their skins of mixed in ther minds!
ONYX, the title, refers to a life long thwarted desire for an unobtainable object (an onyx ring) that becomes available only after Charon guides the main character across the river Styx. Love, relationships, family, finding physical solace in a surrogate sexual fling, the vileness of AIDS and the accompanying tragedies encountered at the demise of a loved one whose family has never accepted the life of the victim, the true meaning of friendship, the equal vileness of cancer, of vehicular deaths, of family hate gone wild - all are components of this book. There are surprising elements that inform us of practices unknown to most of us (were you aware that you could watch a cremation with all its gothic elements?), as well as pages of simply lyrical prose becoming poetry. Picano knows how to create atmosphere, how to lead us through the complexities of nature's erratic moves, and most of all he knows how to keep our attention focused in reading a book that becomes addictive.
For those who have not had the pleasure of reading Picano, jump in and ready yourself for a ride you'll not forget. From another artistic viewpoint this book design, cover, printing choices, page layout are the work of an extraordinary craftsman. This reader finds ONYX to be his finest novel to date.....and waiting for what is next!
ONYX is an amazingly fine novel from a writer who seems to grow with each published work. Though many may overlook this latest book as merely another Violet Quill opus chronicling gay life, this book is more than a solid story, more than a beautifully written novel, more than many other books in this genre. This novel is an elegantly written exploration of the quest of the individual in the 21st Century - the immediacy and inexplicable choices that death makes, how individuals deal with genetic agar plates peppered by the vagaries of childhood environments/family history/social mores/chance encounters, why we become puppets of our stage play of id/ego/superego. Picano has created thoroughly 3-dimensional characters who leap off the page as both good and bad acquaintances we've all encountered. There seems to be much autobiographical material here: how else could the author know the complexities of his characters unless he'd lived in their skins of mixed in ther minds!
ONYX, the title, refers to a life long thwarted desire for an unobtainable object (an onyx ring) that becomes available only after Charon guides the main character across the river Styx. Love, relationships, family, finding physical solace in a surrogate sexual fling, the vileness of AIDS and the accompanying tragedies encountered at the demise of a loved one whose family has never accepted the life of the victim, the true meaning of friendship, the equal vileness of cancer, of vehicular deaths, of family hate gone wild - all are components of this book. There are surprising elements that inform us of practices unknown to most of us (were you aware that you could watch a cremation with all its gothic elements?), as well as pages of simply lyrical prose becoming poetry. Picano knows how to create atmosphere, how to lead us through the complexities of nature's erratic moves, and most of all he knows how to keep our attention focused in reading a book that becomes addictive.
For those who have not had the pleasure of reading Picano, jump in and ready yourself for a ride you'll not forget. From another artistic viewpoint this book design, cover, printing choices, page layout are the work of an extraordinary craftsman. This reader finds ONYX to be his finest novel to date.....and waiting for what is next!
October 2, 2019
"Onyx" was a wonderful read, bold, and with no holds barred. It became a horror story with delicious characters. I started to read in small bites towards the end because I wanted the characters to stay around for a while. One character's death killed me and I ached to see the evil Adele die, but it's satisfying to know she's spending Eternity burning in Hell. And we know what that looks like from reading the harrowing cremation scene.
February 11, 2020
NOTE: This book was provided by ReQueered Tales for the purpose of a review on Rainbow Book Reviews.
I wonder who wrote the blurb for this novel, which unfortunately makes it sound as if it told the story of the final showdown between a Cruella-like mother and the gay man she hates for living with her son and blames for anything that goes wrong on this planet. That is not what “Onyx” is about. To be honest, it is rather hard to describe what it is indeed about. To name but a few themes: love, for sure; death with its multifaceted faces; grief and the questions “Is there such a thing as anticipated grief?” and “If yes, does it make the actual dying of a loved person easier?”; memories and what one makes them into (or out of them); resilience; saying goodbye and letting go. Obviously enough, this is not the “gayest” of novels (in the primal sense of the word “gay”), and yet, it was a lot less heavy and sad than I expected, thanks to the author’s impressive writing style.
In a nutshell, this story is about Ray Henriques, successful editor and (re-)publisher of classical music records, and his long-time boyfriend Jesse. It is the early nineties; they are living in New York. Ray is working at home, which leaves him enough time to take care of Jesse, who is slowly dying of AIDS (triple-drug therapy wasn’t yet available), or rather, Jesse drifts away little by little. He has made peace with his fate and is more worried about his lover than himself. As their sex life has become inexistent, he is happy when Ray finally finds a new sex partner (I’m reluctant to call him a “lover”—that would imply too much intimacy) in young, hunky, heterosexual, married Mike, a repairman. As the plot slowly unravels and Jesse senses the end approaching, he finally calls his fundamentalist Christian mother, whom I perceived as an unwielding, uncaring, unloving, egotistical adverse force. When she comes to New York, she does everything in her might to make life impossible for her “son-in-law” Ray and to model Jesse’s last moments following her own conception of how she wants her son to die (talk about egotistical!).
Several secondary plots are woven around this tale: Ray’s work on the music score of an independent movie and its subsequent success, which provides a new horizon for the after-Jesse era; Ray’s friendship with J.K., who is also dying of AIDS, with less resilience than Jesse; Ray’s nephew and niece, whom they both dote on and who, in the beginning, act as reminders of life’s positive sides the same way carefree Mike does. But the niece is diagnosed with leukemia, and the boy is killed in a car accident shortly after Jesse’s death. With this, it seems as if all bridges are burned in some sort of overkill plot development so that Ray can leave New York behind “unencumbered” (make those quotation marks extra-huge) and start a new life on the West Coast. For those who think this is plot overkill, the author’s foreword is a useful reminder that sometimes real life deals people with unlikely chains of events that, in a novel, might come across as too much. But they exist.
First things first, I have read several other novels by Felice Picano and have always liked his way of exploring plots and characters; you could say I’m a fan of Mr. Picano’s – not the gushing sort, but I consider and appreciate him as someone who has accompanied my adult life with his writing and has partly shaped my tastes. In the line of books I have read, “Onyx” is no exception insofar as I have immensely enjoyed my reading experience. The author provides me with characters I can easily relate to, despite the somewhat dreary main theme, death. This novel is a necessary reminder not only of a special period in time when people died by the hundreds and thousands – friends, lovers, sons and daughters – but also a reminder of the fact that life is precious and fragile and that what one takes for the sense of their lives can be swept away very quickly. Some of the questions asked are: Is life an emptiness humans are asked to fill time and again? What is it they fill it with? A lover? A career? Kids? Friends? Family? How do they react when those central “items” are taken away?
The characters, as mentioned, are suffiently fleshed out to feel alive and real, even those I only got to know fleetingly, such as Mike, for instance. Where Ray is perhaps a bit harder to get, drifting through his life, going through the notions without thinking things over too much, Jesse is easy enough to grasp and easy enough to love (he was my favorite character throughout the book, by the way). The author even offers a hateable person with Jesse’s self-righteous bigot mother—very clever because she was a convenient outlet for all the fuzzy, unfocused anger I felt the more pages I turned (anger mostly directed at AIDS, so in a sense a personified emotional outlet was sorely needed).
I’m sorry to say that I need to bring up some niggles I had with this book, however. As Mr. Picano has chosen to write parts of the narrative in long and description-rich prose, several of the descriptors came across as “too much”, i.e. too winding, too dense, and as a result somewhat clumsy. There were also some serious grammar issues I was willing to attribute to the author’s emotional state when he wrote this book (I daresay Mr. Picano knows the difference between subject and object in a sentence and normally wouldn’t mix up “I” and “me” or “who” and “whom”; at any rate, I don’t recall having encountered any such errors in his other books). And another point were the short bits written in a foreign language. Unfortunately, those were languages I not only speak (Spanish, for instance), but speak even better than I speak English (French and German, that is), and I noticed the passages were riddled with mistakes, which took off some of the author’s credibility, I’m afraid. I will be absolutely blunt: if the book had been written by any less talented author, I would have been thoroughly pissed off (pardon my French). As it is, strangely enough, I noticed these shortcomings, but when I closed the book, I only felt… appalled. Appalled by a very strong, very good book.
I wonder who wrote the blurb for this novel, which unfortunately makes it sound as if it told the story of the final showdown between a Cruella-like mother and the gay man she hates for living with her son and blames for anything that goes wrong on this planet. That is not what “Onyx” is about. To be honest, it is rather hard to describe what it is indeed about. To name but a few themes: love, for sure; death with its multifaceted faces; grief and the questions “Is there such a thing as anticipated grief?” and “If yes, does it make the actual dying of a loved person easier?”; memories and what one makes them into (or out of them); resilience; saying goodbye and letting go. Obviously enough, this is not the “gayest” of novels (in the primal sense of the word “gay”), and yet, it was a lot less heavy and sad than I expected, thanks to the author’s impressive writing style.
In a nutshell, this story is about Ray Henriques, successful editor and (re-)publisher of classical music records, and his long-time boyfriend Jesse. It is the early nineties; they are living in New York. Ray is working at home, which leaves him enough time to take care of Jesse, who is slowly dying of AIDS (triple-drug therapy wasn’t yet available), or rather, Jesse drifts away little by little. He has made peace with his fate and is more worried about his lover than himself. As their sex life has become inexistent, he is happy when Ray finally finds a new sex partner (I’m reluctant to call him a “lover”—that would imply too much intimacy) in young, hunky, heterosexual, married Mike, a repairman. As the plot slowly unravels and Jesse senses the end approaching, he finally calls his fundamentalist Christian mother, whom I perceived as an unwielding, uncaring, unloving, egotistical adverse force. When she comes to New York, she does everything in her might to make life impossible for her “son-in-law” Ray and to model Jesse’s last moments following her own conception of how she wants her son to die (talk about egotistical!).
Several secondary plots are woven around this tale: Ray’s work on the music score of an independent movie and its subsequent success, which provides a new horizon for the after-Jesse era; Ray’s friendship with J.K., who is also dying of AIDS, with less resilience than Jesse; Ray’s nephew and niece, whom they both dote on and who, in the beginning, act as reminders of life’s positive sides the same way carefree Mike does. But the niece is diagnosed with leukemia, and the boy is killed in a car accident shortly after Jesse’s death. With this, it seems as if all bridges are burned in some sort of overkill plot development so that Ray can leave New York behind “unencumbered” (make those quotation marks extra-huge) and start a new life on the West Coast. For those who think this is plot overkill, the author’s foreword is a useful reminder that sometimes real life deals people with unlikely chains of events that, in a novel, might come across as too much. But they exist.
First things first, I have read several other novels by Felice Picano and have always liked his way of exploring plots and characters; you could say I’m a fan of Mr. Picano’s – not the gushing sort, but I consider and appreciate him as someone who has accompanied my adult life with his writing and has partly shaped my tastes. In the line of books I have read, “Onyx” is no exception insofar as I have immensely enjoyed my reading experience. The author provides me with characters I can easily relate to, despite the somewhat dreary main theme, death. This novel is a necessary reminder not only of a special period in time when people died by the hundreds and thousands – friends, lovers, sons and daughters – but also a reminder of the fact that life is precious and fragile and that what one takes for the sense of their lives can be swept away very quickly. Some of the questions asked are: Is life an emptiness humans are asked to fill time and again? What is it they fill it with? A lover? A career? Kids? Friends? Family? How do they react when those central “items” are taken away?
The characters, as mentioned, are suffiently fleshed out to feel alive and real, even those I only got to know fleetingly, such as Mike, for instance. Where Ray is perhaps a bit harder to get, drifting through his life, going through the notions without thinking things over too much, Jesse is easy enough to grasp and easy enough to love (he was my favorite character throughout the book, by the way). The author even offers a hateable person with Jesse’s self-righteous bigot mother—very clever because she was a convenient outlet for all the fuzzy, unfocused anger I felt the more pages I turned (anger mostly directed at AIDS, so in a sense a personified emotional outlet was sorely needed).
I’m sorry to say that I need to bring up some niggles I had with this book, however. As Mr. Picano has chosen to write parts of the narrative in long and description-rich prose, several of the descriptors came across as “too much”, i.e. too winding, too dense, and as a result somewhat clumsy. There were also some serious grammar issues I was willing to attribute to the author’s emotional state when he wrote this book (I daresay Mr. Picano knows the difference between subject and object in a sentence and normally wouldn’t mix up “I” and “me” or “who” and “whom”; at any rate, I don’t recall having encountered any such errors in his other books). And another point were the short bits written in a foreign language. Unfortunately, those were languages I not only speak (Spanish, for instance), but speak even better than I speak English (French and German, that is), and I noticed the passages were riddled with mistakes, which took off some of the author’s credibility, I’m afraid. I will be absolutely blunt: if the book had been written by any less talented author, I would have been thoroughly pissed off (pardon my French). As it is, strangely enough, I noticed these shortcomings, but when I closed the book, I only felt… appalled. Appalled by a very strong, very good book.
August 21, 2015
There are so many things wrong with this book-- where do I begin? It's unfortunate that this was my first Felice Picano choice, because I'm sure he's normally a very talented writer. This did have some great moments, now and again, but there are just too many flaws. Too many tiresome scenes written at the perspective of Jesse's hideous mother, for instance, and just too much perspective-hopping in general. Normally I enjoy a book full of pain and sorrow, but this became an excruciating read. Halfway in, you're likely to be screaming "PULL THE PLUG ALREADY!" in regard to a character known to be (medically) doomed. The story would make anyone thankful for the advent of physician-assisted suicide. Numerous pointless flashbacks halt the narrative completely, with one laughably triggered by someone's body odor smelling like honey. This would have been much better as a short story.
On top of all its other issues... the sex scenes usually have some potency, only for it to be undermined by too-flowery language and allusions and everything else. Not to mention the inclusion of certain details better left unwritten: "Mike's -ass smell-," Felice, really? There are many superior books you could read before getting to this one.
On top of all its other issues... the sex scenes usually have some potency, only for it to be undermined by too-flowery language and allusions and everything else. Not to mention the inclusion of certain details better left unwritten: "Mike's -ass smell-," Felice, really? There are many superior books you could read before getting to this one.
September 14, 2007
This book was a little dark for my taste.I am not saying it wasnt an excellent book just not my cup of tea. Didnt stop me from reading Felices books. He has also been a frequent guest at Saints and Sinners. He has been a member of the Violet Quill for many years and has been honored with many awards.
October 14, 2009
not a bad story, although I felt like I wanted a "happier" ending...but I think that is more a result of the schlock I've been reading lately that wraps up in neat tidy morsels. This is a good read, would def recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews