O Beautiful

by Jesse Green

Martin takes the day off from work to make an elaborate meal for his friend Stella and the blind date who could be Martin's match. Matt certainly is charming and good-looking, but -- as both Martin and Stella discover before the entree is served -- he is also straight. Yet by evening's end, Martin is irrevocably drawn to this magnetic, spirited, and unattainable man.
So Martin obliges when Matt finds hiimself needing a place to stay, and the two embark upon an oddly comfortable relationship that involves every shade of intimacy but sex. The closer Martin gets to Matt, however, the more he realizes that his enigmatic roommate may not be all that he seems.
"Wonderful, memorable . . . A novel about my favorite kind of love -- obsessive, unrequited and impossible . . . Jesse Green writes with precision and intelligence." -- Stephen McCauley

Genres: Gay, LGBT, Fiction, Queer

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Surreysmum · Rating 3 out of 5]

[These notes were made in 1992:]. A first novel from a gay New York journalist, and it has all the punning ease you'd expect from that provenance. I enjoyed Green's style, and particularly his habit of twisting cliché'd phrases - "Be fretful and mortify," "stream of conscience." But he doesn't overdo it, and that's a nice surprise. The story in bald outline is rather a depressing one - a gay theatre designer, rather repressed & pernickety, is introduced by his woman friend Stella (who is a major character in the novel) to a gorgeous young man, who turns out to be straight, but moves in with Martin (the designer) when he needs a place to stay. Martin falls intensely for Matt, whose motives & actions remain enigmatic; they have a domestic but not sexual relationship. Eventually Matt accepts an acting job out of town, and when Martin visits him there, Matt's perplexing behaviour comes to a climax (literally) - he allows a sort of sexual consummation, but then disappears with Martin's bank card and robs him. It eventually emerges that Matt has been supporting a drug habit - or rather, Martin has been supporting it for him. Out of all this, the conclusion is not as depressing as it may seem, for Martin gets out of it an advance in his own understanding of himself and the ways of life. He realizes (and of course I'm oversimplifying terribly) that the attraction to beauty & perfection is deceptive & painful, & there are some signs towards the end that he is finding comfort in people - real people, including his neighbour's new baby. The character of Stella interested me. I wonder if Green drew her from the life - some of her idiosyncrasies seem so true and likely. She's a fag-hag (I use the term with wry affection) who has lost a lot of weight, made a success of her professional life, and cannot get past her habit of picking men who are impossible! (And once she gets a good one by mistake & has to dump him). I particularly liked an episode where Martin, not usually given to altruistic display, slaps a sniggering gallery patron who calls Stella "fag-hag." I'll be watching for Green's name again.

[Katie M. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I reached my quota of gay white 1990s NYC novels a long time ago; I really need to learn to stop picking them up because it never ends well for me.

[will price · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin is soooo whiny. This novel was fine. It doesn't really go anywhere, but it did make me think about, well, beauty and my relationship with it. I can relate to Martin's philosophy of "if I can't be considered beautiful, I'll surround myself with beautiful things and chase after beauty at every turn". I do like this exploration of the human relationship with beauty, especially from the perspective of a (somewhat repressed) gay man. I also enjoyed the relationship between Martin and Stella; their friendship is a constant that feels familiar. I think the last part, "Milk", is far and away the best part of the book. A lot of the amorphous philosophical questions and explorations are finally being synthesized into the text and actions of the final part, which feels like a pay-off for the posturing in the earlier parts.

"Who knew what else might be pure fabrication? His tastes? His affections? It was as if he had never chosen a thing for himself, never taken time to decide what was right. He had lived his life in a stream of conscience, repeating certain hand-me-down words until they took on power from the repetition itself. Family. Love. And most of all beauty. He had said the word, in all its forms, over and over, millions of times, not sure what it was, believing it absolutely."
- pg. 262