What do you think?
Rate this book
Privates
Part of the Stonewall Inn Editions Series
Paperback
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 1, 2019
Really two stories in one following a rabbit trial of varying flashbacks, Gene Horowitz' "Privates" is a sadly anachronistic tale about a gay man who even late in life hasn't seemed to really work through his own issues in a way that allows him to have trusting relationships with his friends and lovers.
Horowitz tells the story of Willy, who at the beginning of the story is in his fifties and spends much of the book reflecting on his time in the military in Texas during the Korean War at age eighteen. While the book is trying to accomplish an explanation of why, after 25 years of being in a loving relationship with his partner, Victor, they separate and Willy goes in search of a past lover, the internal conflict complicit in this never surfaces. And this is all made even more confusing by the constant barrage of deeper and deeper flashbacks that make this seem more like "Inception" than a novel.
A fifty page prologue for a book that is less than 250 pages should be a warning sign enough about how unsatisfying this book would be, but, sadly, I didn't heed the warning. Perhaps you should heed mine then: skip this "classic" for another.
Horowitz tells the story of Willy, who at the beginning of the story is in his fifties and spends much of the book reflecting on his time in the military in Texas during the Korean War at age eighteen. While the book is trying to accomplish an explanation of why, after 25 years of being in a loving relationship with his partner, Victor, they separate and Willy goes in search of a past lover, the internal conflict complicit in this never surfaces. And this is all made even more confusing by the constant barrage of deeper and deeper flashbacks that make this seem more like "Inception" than a novel.
A fifty page prologue for a book that is less than 250 pages should be a warning sign enough about how unsatisfying this book would be, but, sadly, I didn't heed the warning. Perhaps you should heed mine then: skip this "classic" for another.
September 28, 2025
Reviewer Erik wisely points out the lopsided nature of this novel's construction, as the 49-page prologue serves two functions, only one of them necessary. The unnecessary one is the story of Aaron, a friend of the on-the-rocks couple Victor and Willy (the novel's protagonist). Aaron, a voiceover artist dying of cancer, is an interesting and even sympathetic character, but excising him from the novel would not alter its structure or narrative coherence one whit. The necessary one is the exposition of the Victor-Willy relationship. Let's ignore the lovely secluded Long Island home these two somehow manage to own on the salaries of (1) an artifact collector for a museum (Victor) and (2) a freelance author (Willy). Victor plays around, and Willy kinda-sorta doesn't mind -- but of course he does, in a more than mildly passive-aggressive manner, and Victor blames Willy for not being more confrontational and suggests that they take a vacation from each other. Which Willy does, seizing upon a standing invitation from Sam, his old Korean War buddy from half a lifetime ago, now settled down in San Francisco.
Now in case one were suspecting that Willy might be something of a doormat, well, those suspicions are lavishly confirmed by the bulk of the novel, which recounts Willy and Sam's Korean War days -- spent entirely in the USA, by the way. Sam is a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Texas stud god -- oh, and gay -- whom Willy immediately falls for, and the two develop a close friendship. But no more than that; Sam affects a division of the gay world into (just-)friends and tricks -- although this doesn't stop him from being more than a bit of a tease. This in turn doesn't stop Willy from carrying a torch for him with a persistence that would put the original Olympic Marathon runner to shame. From the point of view of a reader, however, this isn't the most annoying part of the relationship; that dubious honor goes to their manner of talking to each other -- and, for that matter, Willy's narrative style. It's not so much the extravagant queeny-ness of their, umm, repartee, but rather the faux-intellectual exhibitionism. Hardly a paragraph goes by without messy gobs of alliteration and oh-so-clever bits of Joyce, Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Father Hopkins, etc. etc. etc. all the way to Sir Thomas Wyatt mixed into their conversations and letters, and into Willy's narrative. If a sentence like the following doesn't have you gagging with disgust, you have no taste: "Of a morning, riding out in my tank for another day's forced fine-tuning of my killing skill, intimations of mortality froze my boiling brain." One encounters "Wohin" and "Quelle horreur" in the same paragraph — something one might, and I repeat MIGHT, accept from a genuine polyglot like Nabokov. But not these guys: If all that weren’t faux-intellectual enough, every now and then the mask slips and a non-word like "penseroso" falls out. (Granted, that must’ve been copped from Milton, who misspelled it too.) But the occasional bit of Southern local color is thrown in to remind us we’re at Fort Hood: a lack of industry or ambition is always “lollygagging”; drinking is always “chugalugging”. Finally: Honestly, Mr. Horowitz, just because you're Jewish and Willy is Jewish doesn't mean that one can use the term "Final Solution" -- yes, with caps -- with reference to anything not the Shoah in a manner that is anything better than tasteless.
Eventually Sam, who has received a promotion for his ability to suck up (and perhaps literally) to his superiors, sends Willy away to Georgia for a brief course of electrical training, thus keeping Willy, so Sam at least claims, from being called up for Korea. And then the most remarkable thing happens. We're now treated to a series of flashbacks within flashbacks -- that is, of Willy's pre-Sam life -- and all of a sudden the prose becomes unaffected and natural. It's as if there's Willy prior to having swallowed the Norton Anthology of English Literature (or whatever they had circa 1950) only to cough up chunks like so many summertime hair balls on the one hand, and on the other the Willy of Korea and, one realizes in retrospect, Long Island. Oh, and one meets, all too briefly, the one gay guy Willy should've settled down and lived happily ever after with, his high school friend Jerry Saperstein. But in all fairness, so few of us make intelligent romantic-erotic decisions when we're at that age.
Sam and Willy are reunited, then discharged, then bum around Mexico for a while until it finally occurs to Willy that he's never going to get inside Sam's pants. (That is to say: When the moment of truth arrives, Sam rejects him.) So Willy returns to New York, and . . . fast forward back to the present. Willy visits Sam in San Francisco , and Sam delivers a long monologue that's more than a little calculated to hurt. This finally enables Willy to reject Sam when Sam, whose erotic star has doubtless faded inversely to the growth of his paunch, FINALLY puts the make on Willy. Willy returns to Long Island a little wiser, and discovers -- this isn't much of a spoiler -- that absence has made Victor's heart grow fonder too, perhaps because Victor's erotic star isn't shining as brightly as it used to, but Willy is too grateful to speculate.
Finally, I realize that Mr. Horowitz has passed on, but I'm still dying to tell him that Sam shouldn't claim to have studied English Lit at "the University of Kansas, in Wichita" (unless Sam has turned out to be a delusional sociopath, but otherwise we have no clues to this effect); the University of Kansas is in Lawrence, and operates only a postgraduate medical school in Wichita. New Yorkers are so nearsighted!
Three rather generous stars.
Now in case one were suspecting that Willy might be something of a doormat, well, those suspicions are lavishly confirmed by the bulk of the novel, which recounts Willy and Sam's Korean War days -- spent entirely in the USA, by the way. Sam is a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Texas stud god -- oh, and gay -- whom Willy immediately falls for, and the two develop a close friendship. But no more than that; Sam affects a division of the gay world into (just-)friends and tricks -- although this doesn't stop him from being more than a bit of a tease. This in turn doesn't stop Willy from carrying a torch for him with a persistence that would put the original Olympic Marathon runner to shame. From the point of view of a reader, however, this isn't the most annoying part of the relationship; that dubious honor goes to their manner of talking to each other -- and, for that matter, Willy's narrative style. It's not so much the extravagant queeny-ness of their, umm, repartee, but rather the faux-intellectual exhibitionism. Hardly a paragraph goes by without messy gobs of alliteration and oh-so-clever bits of Joyce, Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Father Hopkins, etc. etc. etc. all the way to Sir Thomas Wyatt mixed into their conversations and letters, and into Willy's narrative. If a sentence like the following doesn't have you gagging with disgust, you have no taste: "Of a morning, riding out in my tank for another day's forced fine-tuning of my killing skill, intimations of mortality froze my boiling brain." One encounters "Wohin" and "Quelle horreur" in the same paragraph — something one might, and I repeat MIGHT, accept from a genuine polyglot like Nabokov. But not these guys: If all that weren’t faux-intellectual enough, every now and then the mask slips and a non-word like "penseroso" falls out. (Granted, that must’ve been copped from Milton, who misspelled it too.) But the occasional bit of Southern local color is thrown in to remind us we’re at Fort Hood: a lack of industry or ambition is always “lollygagging”; drinking is always “chugalugging”. Finally: Honestly, Mr. Horowitz, just because you're Jewish and Willy is Jewish doesn't mean that one can use the term "Final Solution" -- yes, with caps -- with reference to anything not the Shoah in a manner that is anything better than tasteless.
Eventually Sam, who has received a promotion for his ability to suck up (and perhaps literally) to his superiors, sends Willy away to Georgia for a brief course of electrical training, thus keeping Willy, so Sam at least claims, from being called up for Korea. And then the most remarkable thing happens. We're now treated to a series of flashbacks within flashbacks -- that is, of Willy's pre-Sam life -- and all of a sudden the prose becomes unaffected and natural. It's as if there's Willy prior to having swallowed the Norton Anthology of English Literature (or whatever they had circa 1950) only to cough up chunks like so many summertime hair balls on the one hand, and on the other the Willy of Korea and, one realizes in retrospect, Long Island. Oh, and one meets, all too briefly, the one gay guy Willy should've settled down and lived happily ever after with, his high school friend Jerry Saperstein. But in all fairness, so few of us make intelligent romantic-erotic decisions when we're at that age.
Sam and Willy are reunited, then discharged, then bum around Mexico for a while until it finally occurs to Willy that he's never going to get inside Sam's pants. (That is to say: When the moment of truth arrives, Sam rejects him.) So Willy returns to New York, and . . . fast forward back to the present. Willy visits Sam in San Francisco , and Sam delivers a long monologue that's more than a little calculated to hurt. This finally enables Willy to reject Sam when Sam, whose erotic star has doubtless faded inversely to the growth of his paunch, FINALLY puts the make on Willy. Willy returns to Long Island a little wiser, and discovers -- this isn't much of a spoiler -- that absence has made Victor's heart grow fonder too, perhaps because Victor's erotic star isn't shining as brightly as it used to, but Willy is too grateful to speculate.
Finally, I realize that Mr. Horowitz has passed on, but I'm still dying to tell him that Sam shouldn't claim to have studied English Lit at "the University of Kansas, in Wichita" (unless Sam has turned out to be a delusional sociopath, but otherwise we have no clues to this effect); the University of Kansas is in Lawrence, and operates only a postgraduate medical school in Wichita. New Yorkers are so nearsighted!
Three rather generous stars.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews