THE DISAPPEARERS, by Marlon James
In the souk that is contemporary publishing, much attention has gone recently to the minimalists and the tinkerers, to writers of short novels steeped in irony. It’s been a meal of small plates, reflective of short attention spans.
The Jamaican writer Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers,” at 600-plus pages, is instead a maximalist’s banquet: It is humane, blood-flecked, disturbing and sustaining. It takes James 90 pages to say hello. It’s another 70 pages before his story settles into your guts and begins to twist them. It’s yet another 150 before you fully comprehend his loping authority and the scale of his ambitions. Booster rockets fall away. Disparate coordinates begin to converge.
Why not just say it? With this novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s, James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.
It deserves to be talked about alongside Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” for its tumult of language and its crisscrossing post-colonial themes; Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” (James picks up on a revenge scenario from that novel); and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” — the greatest American novel, I’d argue — for many reasons but especially for the way James, like Faulkner, hammers his themes like a Vulcan, rolling over them relentlessly from new and sometimes oblique angles, advancing and enlarging his attack each time. This is another way of saying “The Disappearers” was one of the signal reading experiences of my adult life. It sank knives deep into my heart. I’m still in recovery from it.
A bonus is that James is casually funny in a way Faulkner rarely is, and his novel has Nirvana and Soundgarden and Duran Duran and Prince cassettes locked into its boom box. It occurred to me around Page 350 that “The Disappearers” places him near the front of the line, a decade or two from now, for the Nobel Prize.
James lives in Brooklyn. He’s in his mid-50s and is the author of five previous novels. The unmissable one is “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a multi-timbral novel about an attempt on the life of Bob Marley. It won the Booker Prize in 2015. Its excellence is little disputed, but “The Disappearers” both resembles and transcends it.
The plot of “The Disappearers” is, on the most basic level, easy to relate. It’s about eight young Black and mixed-race men in Kingston who gather in private, in 1988, to rehearse a dangerous play: John Herbert’s “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” (1967), about prison life and degradation and sex acts both desired and not. (One character refers to it as “‘Lord of the Flies’ with big people.”) Most if not all the actors are closeted gay men.
A rehearsal is raided, in a scorchingly violent scene — teeth are scattered like diamonds, bones are broken, eyes gouged out — by a homophobic mob. (Jamaica being Jamaica at the time, the marauders are treated as heroes.) This episode, a novella all its own, is related from the point of view of the predators and functions like the initial break shot in a game of pool.
We trace a clutch of characters forward and backward in time, mostly in the form of letters, journals and interviews. By the novel’s end, some of these pool balls have either cracked or jumped the table entirely and have lodged in remote and squalid corners.
This is a profane gay sex novel, one that finds its center of gravity at crotch level, and it’s a sacred one too — so visceral that it implies heterosexuals are sleepwalking through their days.
I wish that John Rechy, the author of “The Sexual Outlaw,” a confrontational nonfiction account of the gay underground scene in Los Angeles during the 1970s, were here to read it. In spoken and unspoken ways James’s novel is composed in his book’s honor. One character suggests that Rechy would find today’s gay men (James refers to them, rakishly, by a common slur) as dull as walking Hallmark cards.
This novel is related in coarse, blunt and wired language: the darker vocabularies we hold back. It’s a hard book to talk about in a family newspaper. One feels like Norman Mailer coerced into using the fig-leaf term “fug” in “The Armies of the Night,” or the street gang member in “West Side Story” who shouts at Officer Krupke, “Krup you!” I suppose you could call James’s language slang, which Carl Sandburg described as “language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” But hands are not what is spat upon here.
It’s hard to talk about this novel, too, because there are at least two dozen ways to pick it up.
It’s about colonialism and tops and bottoms; about how pop culture, especially music, can upend lives; about violence, pity, disgust, shame, exile and revenge; about the nature of Jamaica and its killing lack of irony; about fathers and sons, gay literature and gay feeling; about the power, at times, of submission and about who gets plowed in this world and who does the plowing. It’s about rejection by family and society. It’s about how the Bible legitimized gay pulverization.
It’s also an AIDS novel, a book about dying alone. (The disappearing acts of gay men are one of the title’s many meanings.) We follow one urbane Jamaican man named Havelock Titus back in time to Oxford University, where he studied and became a sexual chew toy for a set of patrician cads. He speaks of “malice” in old dining halls. He was at the doomed rehearsal and is ashamed that he ran away. He was an early AIDS patient. He recalls the days when a man could get hacked to death for wearing eye shadow.
This novel doesn’t have a saccharine bone in its body, but a native sweetness slips through. One narrator thinks, “Nobody told him that wanting to be held and kissed and thought of was a human thing, not just a woman thing. Nobody has told a single man or woman in this country. Nobody told me.”
Ideas matter in a work of fiction, but if a book isn’t alive, they count for naught. What follows are a few observations about what it’s like to tumble around inside “The Disappearers.” One Jamaican narrator latches on to what he can of bubble-butt American culture, in escape from his life’s thin realities. There’s a thunderous ode to the glory of Bruce Springsteen’s glutes (“right above the crack will be a patch of sweat in a perfect V”), and dreams of a scenario in which Don Johnson, Pierce Brosnan and Mark Harmon are engaged with different parts of the narrator’s anatomy. I could parse this motormouth material for pages. Some kid is always ecstatically rubbing one out.
This writing shifts into higher registers. James has a gut-level understanding of why music matters in our lives as well as a vinyl nerd’s delight in the minutiae. “I feel like the last song on a Joy Division record,” is a not-untypical comment. One character has turned away from reggae, in part because “the boys who made my life hell in high school like Peter Tosh,” in favor of American grunge bands. “Sad Seattle white boys,” he deposes, “are teaching me how to live.”
Music was the first thing, he says, that ever loved him back. He tends to think in song lyrics, because they’re the first words that cut through to him. Music sets him on fire with euphoria: He wants to slit his own skin and crawl out. Yet music can also “love you hard and leave you worse than it found you.”
The cultural material drifts higher. A few of the narrators are so casually literate that James smuggles in a witty lo-fi critical tour of gay literature, from E.M. Forster and Jean Genet through James Baldwin, Paul Monette and Edmund White. These young men got their learning the way Ta-Nehisi Coates told us he did: “three call slips at a time.”
The book argues that Trollope is better than Dickens (because he is more political) and Auden is better than Eliot (because “Eliot is talking at you while Auden is talking to you”). Though it’s not mentioned, this novel will send some readers back to Auden’s candid oral sex poem “The Platonic Blow,” often omitted from popular editions of his work, which places, as does James, homosexual desire within a long intellectual lineage.
The sex writing is incandescent, the pages littered with condoms, K-Y, enema kits and blood. I can quote almost none of this material (except lines like “I’m the giddy cowboy with the wide stance”), but James uses the torrent of sex scenes, in libraries, in public urinals, on manicured lawns, in the houses of strangers or tricks, to shake down the human condition.
Wit is indispensable to understanding, and in “The Disappearers” James dispenses it nonchalantly. It’s the lime juice that cuts the night sweats. On literacy and its discontents: “Carrying a book to a party was nowhere as cool as I thought it would be.” On dating: “Do I want to venture into the house of a man who alphabetizes his porn?” On negotiations over what sex acts are on the table: “Not everything in the KFC bucket you need to eat.” On morning beverages: “Coffee makes me think people are after me.”
His close observational skills are everywhere apparent. One man “does that thing only Jamaicans do, point ahead by jutting out their lips.” I don’t know what “woke” means any longer, but “The Disappearers” is not that — or, if it is, it flies both below and above the discourse.
As the book moves forward, one character takes over his father’s funeral home and slowly goes mad. Two others disappear after the night of violence and are searched for. One of the narrators is a man who was supposed to be there that night but, suspiciously, was not.
Lingering at the margins is a well-connected yet recessive Gatsby figure named Paul Royale, who quietly assists gay men in crisis but is also described as a “pederasty-grooming, boy-exploiting size queen.” Royale might also have fallen from Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice,” about a repressed intellectual’s idealization of young boys. This role will be eagerly sought in a film version.
James works right out on the margins of his subconsciousness and consistently seeks the core of things. You recognize here the slow rise of character and the chiming of themes. Present as well are the dull passages that are oddly essential to great novels. One of his sentences will owe its oomph to one that preceded it by 85 pages. No corner of experience is rounded off. Some of the ironies are pitched so high that only a dog can hear them.
Here is where a critic will mention a flaw or two, in the hope of retaining credibility. At moments scenes felt over the top, in a Zorro meets Tarantino fashion. (These characters have ingested a lot of anime.) About one of the British toffs, James is too on the nose. Once or twice, I found myself lost, unsure of who was speaking. On this matter I’m in league with Nadine Gordimer, who said she didn’t mind being occasionally puzzled. It all comes together in the end. These are venial sins.
Patricia Highsmith, whose baleful influence is felt in this novel, wrote that “because of what they have been through, all homosexuals are blood brothers across time.” James, a long-haul trucker of the human spirit, carves that notion into his novel’s chest.
You don’t finish “The Disappearers.” It finishes you.
THE DISAPPEARERS: By Marlon James | Riverhead | 616 pp. | $32
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