 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
|
|
||||||
| Ben Neihart, author of
the critically acclaimed Hey, Joe, is growing up. In Hey Joe,
his first novel, teenager Joe Keith is “a brooder, a magazine reader, a
swaying dancer at mellow jazzy rap parties. He kept his hair cut short
like the other smoked-out newbies at Metairie Park Country Day, and the
only shoes he wore were black suede Pumas.” Neihart’s second novel, Burning Girl, begins, “Drew Burke, who was twenty, thrived in manly Baltimore. He told friends back home in New Orleans that kids were tall here, and strong. Girls were as buff, knicked up, and cocky as guys. Especially at Johns Hopkins, where Drew was a junior and everyone played soccer and blade hockey and lacrosse.” The books are growing up, too. In Hey, Joe, the story of one night in the life of a cool, unhung-up gay teen in New Orleans, he touches the edges of darkness. In Burning Girl, Drew jumps headlong into the dark past of his best friend, a rich girl named Bahar Richards, and her brother, Jake, a “melancholy hottie. The two of them had been keeping time for six weeks now.” |
 |
Like a 90s college Nick Carraway,
Drew comes from a poor family. “To get by in plush style, he leaned on
rich friends.” He’s a solid kind of guy, though he has come a long way.
Before he met Bahar Richards, “I couldn’t negotiate a conversation. I felt
like an ugly alien and I almost dropped out of school. But Bahar came after
me. I mean, it changed me. She sought me out. This beautiful girl with
real money and a way of being out here in the real world.” Despite their financial differences, Drew feels a bond with Bahar, and later, as he gets to know him, with Jake. Their relationships are complex, beginning with Drew’s initial financial envy, which concerns him at first. “Man, he said to himself, what am I doing? Am I like a would-be player? An easy lay? Am I the guy who doesn’t just sort of jokingly think he’s enriched by a suit, a new black Gucci suit, but who actually experiences that transformation as if he deserved it, as if it were a moral victory?” |
| But Drew looks deeper,
first at Bahar. “He turned to look at her. Why? He wanted to ask her.
Why are you so hard? Why are you the way you are? She was a hard metal girl.
So was that why he loved her? Was that how he wanted to be? Did he want
to shine like her? Did he want her cold blood to pulse through his veins?
It tempted him. His brain shivered and he felt darkness pull across his
body and he wanted it to stop right away.” Bahar and Jake feel this connection,
too, for reasons that only become clear toward the end of the novel. “You’re
enough like me that I can trust you,” Jake says to Drew. “And you’re enough
better than me that I can trust you.”
Neihart has done such a great job of building these characters into a tightly
bonded threesome that it feels a little niggling to complain that he doesn’t
tie everything together by the end of the book. He doesn’t quite understand
how to tame this rambunctious, runaway plot, or how to make his characters
finally come clean in a way that the reader can fully understand.
As well, his dialogue sparkles with wit and sharply turned phrases, as in
this exchange between Drew and Bahar over a mutual acquaintance. “Lady, your talk is lousy with mistakes, okay? Mary Hong is a devout, proud, strong, Church-of-God, brilliant, pisser-funny diva. I would think you could like be forbearing. Man, be forbearing Bahar why don’t you?” She gave him a curdled look. “No. I don’t respect her. You’ll be wanting me to start respecting people right and left.” “God I’m a chilling prick to encourage such a loathsome code. I better look deep inside myself, huh?” Like Joe Keith, Drew Burke is gay, but the book isn’t about something that happens to a gay character—it’s about a complex, multi-faceted character who happens to be gay. The book brings to mind another young southern voice, that of Donna Tartt, whose The Secret History was also about college students with a dark and deadly secret. Burning Girl is a great step forward for an author with a terrific voice and a strong sense of character. It delivers on the promise of Hey, Joe, and creates a whole new set of expectations, as Neihart and his characters continue to grow and mature. | |