An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis

[Ulysses]

I know that Chuck has written about this - but apparently not on its own... I read this because of him and I am grateful. I don't think I loved it the way he did...but I'm glad I read it.
Mark Merlis' "An Arrow's Flight" is a really interesting read. The narrative is built on the intriguing placement of the last years of the Trojan war in modern day, and basing the convoluted plot line on the proposition that Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, is a young gay man working as a hustler in the City.

Although this is clearly a novel written in the first decade of the 21st century, all through "An Arrow's Flight" I kept thinking of the trailblazing gay novels of the 1980s, Andrew Holleran's "Dancer from the Dance," and the splenetic Larry Kramer's "Faggots;" both of which I read as a young man caught up in the nightmare of the evolving AIDS crisis. The re-imagination of the story of Pyrrhus and Philoctetes as a metaphor (avatar?) of AIDS and its devastation of Gay America is sort of brilliant, and Merlis' unblinking, sharp-edged tweaking of classical narrative is at times chilling.

Merlis' writing is wry and detached, and while I know it's entirely intentional, I found it disconcerting that I could never attach to Pyrrhus, the ethereally beautiful redhead who wanders fecklessly through his life toward what might be his Fate. It is hard for me to love a book when I can't love the characters, and Merlis perversely doesn't seem to want us to love the characters (again, reminding me of Halloran and Kramer's books). Pyrrhus is not bad, not evil. Bereft of any kind of real familial love (Achilles would win no parenting prizes, and Deidamea, his mother, is no June Cleaver), it is no wonder he treats everyone he knows with amiable selfishness, shunning any sort of emotional connection in favor of cashing in on his beauty in an urban gay world where beauty is the chief currency.

The plot thickens when Phoenix, Achilles' eunuch valet, arrives in the City to enlist Pyrrhus into the Greek army - there, it seems, to fulfill his destiny. It is from this moment that Pyrrhus begins to develop complexity, as the epic childishness of the gods and the patent absurdity of the entire Trojan conflict are gradually picked apart. We never see a battle; nothing epic happens. But in the second half of the novel Pyrrhus surprises both the reader and himself.

I never found an emotional core to the book until the end, where a surprisingly emotional payoff (written with a calculated lack of emotion - it's not as if Merlis's style changes - just my reaction to the narrative) suddenly throws the rest of the book into context in a way that took me slightly by surprise. This is about as unromantic a book as I've read in a long time, and yet I found, at last, that my heart was finally touched by these unfortunate antique figures dressed in modern gay costume. Having felt skeptical and mildly irritated throughout most of the book, I finally capitulated at the finale and let myself be manipulated as if the gods themselves were pulling the strings.