G'day all,
Interesting responses to my post. Thanks.

I'm bemused -- though not surprised -- that most of the posts disagreeing with my perspective also contain diminishment of what I was saying. I guess that's what people do with an uncomfortable topic. Sorry folks, I'm not just being delicate or too easily upset. If you think I was complaining simply that Preston is effeminate, you've missed my point. (Oh, and I'm not actually upset at all, just -- as I said -- disappointed. But then ask anyone in a minority about all the little disappointments that mount up during the course of even a single day, that other people wouldn't even notice, largely because they don't have to deal with them.) It's a difficult balance, this Life thing; I'm not about trying to tell people what attitudes to have, but on the other hand, should concerns not be voiced as they appear ? And may I just suggest that often what is dismissable to one person as mere "political correctness" is another person's struggle for a sense of breathing space.

FPW, I'm not sure how to read your post. Were you offended ? Sorry if so, that wasn't my intention. The fact that you have friends who are gay, though, doesn't negate what I was suggesting. But I'm certainly not about to stop reading (and *buying* !) your books, because they're so damned good. Maybe I just want everything ! :p

For those who've kindly suggested I read "Hosts", I have. (I'm reading the books in sequence, and after posting this, I'm off to bed with my new copy of "Infernal".) At the risk of sounding evasive, that doesn't negate my comments either. I'd like to point out that it's been often and strongly noted in the social sciences that most people, of all genders and sexual orientation, have a different response and attitude towards gay men from what they do towards lesbians. The way they treat one offers no guide to how they'll treat the other. Even in the worst of times for homos, you'll find people will generally be more tolerant and "understanding" of lesbians. (Britain's Queen Victoria, for instance, found gay women at least comprehensible; it was only gay men she passed a law against.) And it's regular fodder for female stand-up comics to point out that hetero guys who find gay men disgusting regularly find gay women intensely erotic.

Anyway, end of the day, if you haven't seen a purple unicorn, it doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. My having seen one doesn't mean that it does; but it also doesn't mean that I am simply delusional.

Oh, and now I'm gonna do it too: I have a good friend () who talks exactly like Abe.

dùrachdan,
Bran

Bran, I'm glad you started this thread. Even if most of us didn't see things the same way, you really gave us something to think about and that's important.

Enjoy Infernal!

Confusing the Narrator with the Author is a mistake that all too many Readers make.

True. It's not what the OP was doing, but perhaps you're speaking more generally.

As a straight person, I understand that I probably won't have the same reactions to certain things as a gay person. Just like as a woman, I react to some things differently than a man does. So, that's all good and I get what you're saying up to a point. However, this...well, I don't get.

When we get to Luther Brady, it starts getting really unpleasant. Being gay is not only pretty clearly linked to the Otherness, which is friggin' insulting, but to paedophilia. Bloody hell !! The other old, gross flying-in-the-face-of-facts cliché about gays gets crammed into the same book. Pretty hard to swallow.

I didn't see that being gay was linked to the Otherness, nor did I see that being gay is somehow linked to pedophilia. What I did see was an evil, vile human being who is a pedophile, just like every other pedophile out there.

And towards the end, when we're told Luther Brady was having nightmare visions of all the big black men lining up in the shower block to gang-rape him ... I nearly threw the book across the room.

You do know what happens to pedophiles in prison...right?

True. It's not what the OP was doing, but perhaps you're speaking more generally.

For the most part, yes - speaking generally. I was picking up a whiff of this Narrator/Author confusion throughout the thread, though, which is why I looked up & posted the wikipedia quote.

Hi all,
I've just finished "Crisscross" (I'm in Australia, and our publishing cycle is a wee bit behind North America), and I have to say -- as usual, it was fantastic. So well written, great entertainment, and FPW does a great job of weaving together stories that you can't imagine will interlock. Looking back from having completed it, it's so perfect -- the stories went exactly where they should; but from the start, you couldn't have foreseen it. (Well, I didn't foresee it, anyway !!)

That's all on the positive side. But there's one that is starting to niggle me through the RJ series, and in "Crisscross" it's really started getting distasteful. And that's FPW's attitude -- not RJ's, so much -- towards gay people.

Look, I know that those who aren't gay will either not have noticed a problem or think there isn't one and it's all in what I'm reading into it; some may even get angry and tell me to get over it (which, in my experience, usually masks an attitude equating to Eddie Murphy's "Why do I ridicule gay people ? Because they're faggots, they deserve it !!"); and yes, I know that women and dark-skinned people and a whole lot of other specific groups of humanity have suffered similar finger-pointing and condescension and occlusion over the years, but that only adds to the weight of why this shouldn't (in my self-interested view) be happening in an RJ book.

Let me get it straight -- as it were ! -- what I'm objecting to. Okay, the character of Preston is an irritating cliché -- jeez, are we back to 70s ? He's straight out of "Fortune and Men's Eyes" -- and I can almost accept it as simply a character FPW wanted Jack to have to negotiate, something outside his norm. Although for my money it's very lazy writing and he's relied on those old, old clichés to draw his character and manipulate his reader's response to him, something that FPW doesn't usually do.

And the whole point of Jack taking up the Louis persona is to make Cordova uncomfortable; fair enough as far as the character goes. But that whole section of the book smacks of a sniggering attitude behind the writing, a kind of rugby-club "bums to the walls, boys !" mentality that invites the reader to squirm right along with Cordova when Jack deliberately moves too physically close. We aren't supposed to like Cordova, we want to see him suffer, so we're supposed to identify with his discomfort at having to chat with and sit with and share a car with a poofter. Ye gods, FPW even makes a point of saying during the scene in Cordova's office that their sitting down means that their butts are in the seats -- I half expected him to have Cordova say something along the lines of the old "don't anyone drop the soap!!" Jeez, FP, that's old Benny Hill-era stuff !!

When we get to Luther Brady, it starts getting really unpleasant. Being gay is not only pretty clearly linked to the Otherness, which is friggin' insulting, but to paedophilia. Bloody hell !! The other old, gross flying-in-the-face-of-facts cliché about gays gets crammed into the same book. Pretty hard to swallow.

And towards the end, when we're told Luther Brady was having nightmare visions of all the big black men lining up in the shower block to gang-rape him ... I nearly threw the book across the room.

Let me be clear: I have no problem with ignorant attitudes being exposed in a character for the audience to scoff at them, but here we're being asked to share the characters' point-of-view as if it's reasonable -- hey, anyone would squirm if a faggot put his hand on their shoulder, right ? -- and respond accordingly.

It comes down to the same sort of attitude that was unwittingly displayed over "Brokeback Mountain", where so many people lamented loudly, and in some cases angrily, that they couldn't go and see it because people might think they were gay. (Hey, walk a mile in my shoes !) I never quite got who they were angry it, because it certainly didn't seem to equate to any sense of how difficult it is for gay people in everyday life, and didn't seem to result in any consciousness-raising. But they just didn't get that their distress over the idea that someone might think they were gay really spoke volumes about their own view about what they thought of gay people and what it meant to be gay.

OK, I've overspent my $0.02. Pardon my soapboxing, but these "he's a real man 'cause he's uncomfortable with gay people" implications have been building up over the last few RJ books, and I find it really pretty ... disappointing.

Not a trolling, just a point of view.
regards all,
Bran

As a dark-skinned person I feel the necessity to chime in. Some of FPW's characters have been racists and I've felt that pinge when one of them has referred to a person as a nigger. But the fact of it remains is that is how some people really are. It's delusional to think that all these people are relegated to being stereotypes. Those people are really out there. I used to be a general laborer working with a guy who referred to anyone he thought was lazy as a nigger. It wasn't pleasant, but that's life. And I think FPW is showing us life as he has seen or sees it. I think the writing from a particular person's point of view goes miles to humanizing his characters and being human is not always equivalent to being nice; the words are mutually exclusive in more instances than we'd like to think. My best friend is gay and I didn't take anything in Crisscross as being pro gay-bashing nor contrawisely being anti-pro gay (I hope everyone knows what I mean; like there was no one cheerleading the shouting down of gaybashers). That's life in all it's ugliness. It would have been easy for me to be offended when I read the words I didn't care for, but that would be ignoring what I've experienced in real life. In the end that stuff helped me to buy into the characters and the novel even more.

Glad to know you find me (and my Jewish friends) tedious, in the extreme, too. :p

Thanks for your good-natured emoticon. I apologize, I didn't recall that you felt that way about Abe's manner of speech, I thought you were just relaying your friends' feelings. (I just skimmed your posts on this thread, I was mostly going by memory from when you brought it up months ago.) I'd have written more carefully, as I don't (i) want to take a swipe at a board member and (ii) think you're tedious in the extreme. To be more precise, I find the disapproval of his speech pattern you've described to be tedious in the extreme.

Bran,

I'm glad you posted, even though I disagree with you. I'm also glad you came back to post again. While I understand and completely agree with you that diminishment is a popular way of dealing with an uncomfortable subject, I hope you won't mind my pointing out that most of what I read here seemed to be not really a diminishment of the distastefulness of advocating intolerant attitudes, so much as diminishments of your assertion that such was to be found in CRISSCROSS.

I look forward to more sincere and thoughtful discourse with you in the future.

Lon

As a dark-skinned person I feel the necessity to chime in. Some of FPW's characters have been racists and I've felt that pinge when one of them has referred to a person as a nigger. But the fact of it remains is that is how some people really are. It's delusional to think that all these people are relegated to being stereotypes. Those people are really out there. I used to be a general laborer working with a guy who referred to anyone he thought was lazy as a nigger. It wasn't pleasant, but that's life. And I think FPW is showing us life as he has seen or sees it. I think the writing from a particular person's point of view goes miles to humanizing his characters and being human is not always equivalent to being nice; the words are mutually exclusive in more instances than we'd like to think. My best friend is gay and I didn't take anything in Crisscross as being pro gay-bashing nor contrawisely being anti-pro gay (I hope everyone knows what I mean; like there was no one cheerleading the shouting down of gaybashers). That's life in all it's ugliness. It would have been easy for me to be offended when I read the words I didn't care for, but that would be ignoring what I've experienced in real life. In the end that stuff helped me to buy into the characters and the novel even more.

Exactly my opinion. How would you make a realistic book, if all the characters are politically correct? Each character has a different personality and different views that have nothing to do with the authors world veiw. FPW even said something to this affect when someone criticized him about Joey's Arab bashing.

Exactly my opinion. How would you make a realistic book, if all the characters are politically correct? Each character has a different personality and different views that have nothing to do with the authors world veiw. FPW even said something to this affect when someone criticized him about Joey's Arab bashing.

Neither of you is getting Bran's point, I can't tell whether it's deliberate or not.

But yes, if the day comes when someone posts something equivalent to "I think FPW should write novels that are both realistic and politically correct" I'll join you in disagreeing with that straw man.

As for "Each character has a different personality and different views that have nothing to do with the authors world veiw," it's grand that you believe it but Bran made an actual argument for why he feels the way he feels; to be meaningful one's disagreement would have to take the form of a counter-argument, not a mere assertion.

I read that part of the book as Cordova being such an ass for feeling like that about potentially gay people. For me it cemented him as a complete jerk. I didn't even consider that the reader was supposed to empathize with him.

I agree. Cordova's homophobia makes him look like even more of a POS.

I like that FPW doesn't shy away from having gay characters in his books. It brings another dimension into his great books. Hopefully this issue won't dissuade you from reading other FPW stuff.

Couldn't have said it better.