James Magruder

An excellent gay coming of age story set in 70s Chicago.
The story is similar to Running with scissors, but the voice is clear and original.
It follows the high schooler Rick Lahrem through the half year he is a member of the speech team of his high school. The same period where he has his sexual debut, his father gets married and his mother finds religion. The story is told in the first person, and is expanded with flashbacks to provide some background as well as occasionally interrupted by show more comments by a 30 years older self. The flashbacks and anecdotes are seamlessly merged with the main story, while the comments provide a bit of distance in emotional scenes without interrupting the flow of the story.
I could wish the the gay stereotypes like the distant father and too close mother relationship were absent, but they are integral to the story, and the book isn't using them apologetically.
The story of a isolated teenager whose rebel anthems are found in musicals instead of the more conventional punk rock is quirky, and presents a new take on the campy gay musical cliche.
The descriptions of period midamerican middleclass are entertaining and believable in their teenage exagerations, and for a non-american the descriptions of american high school are fascinating in an anthropological sense.
The religion critique that is running through the book is humorous, and the peer interaction fresh and original.
If you are familiar with the mercenary religious practices of the US, the very end may seem less anticlimactic, and more profound. At least it took me a bit of reflexion to work it out to my satisfaction. show less

This book is a delightful romp through the libidos of Yale graduate students living together in the Helen Hadley residential hall in the early 1980s. I was a professional student at Yale about twelve years earlier, and I remember Helen Hadley Hall, although I did not reside there. I remember it largely because its name was female. The only such name, I believe, amidst the scores of "male" Yale buildings: Harkness, Sterling, Calhoun, Morse, Silliman, Davenport, Stiles, Trumbull, ad show more nauseam.

The author fleshes out the mysterious Helen Hadley. He gives her a life of 56 years (1895 - 1951) and trains her in chemistry. He is quiet about her Yale connections, but informs us that the love of her life was a woman. Thus, she observes and describes same sex unions with equanimity. That is useful, because she is the narrator of these stories of the (mostly) gay and bisexual pairings of the residents of the Hall during 1983 - 1984.

The stories are funny, although during their telling the spreading "gay cancer" gets a name and is the source of increasing anxiety among the book's characters. Indeed, in a postscript, we learn that most of the male folk in the book later die of the disease.

The author knows academics well. He has a graduate degree in French from Yale and is currently an Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy at Swarthmore. His writing is clever and economical, with literary and artistic references used lavishly:

"A thorough grounding in history and the history of art made Randall less susceptible than others to the mandates of Leviticus. There was nothing inherently wrong in loving another man in the manner of the Greeks, or of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, or David and Jonathan. As Randall went about his days . . . he knew he would die for Silas, if asked, but he wasn't sure, in point of fact, whether he need ever kiss him. For the time being, Silas was a Mannerist portrait: elongated, virtuoso, cool, 'in quotation marks', and unreal."

The author describes couplings - and the lustings for them - many, many times, and in many, many ways. But each description is fresh and humorous:

"Their sex he likened to atom-smashing; each blasted against the other with an annihilating carnality that created new matter. And as the air warmed with the arrival of spring, Silas, haunching around campus, tumescent with thoughts of past days and nights to come, felt like a list of the -id adjectives: Fetid, squalid, humid, turbid, turgid, rabid, rancid, lurid."

And even his non-libidinous writing is wonderful. Helen Hadley's description of the French department chair:

"[T]he department chair could have been my father or any one of my seven uncles, or my forsaken fiance. They're tall, rector-ish New Englanders, whose weedy builds, sloping slightly at the shoulders, are kept in trim by morning Grape Nuts and squash twice a week. Nathaniel Gates' russet hair was streaked with gray, and it curled a bit, as it did now, when damp. Habituated to privilege and command, yet guided by thrift and industry, a man like Nathaniel Gates is the platonic ideal of the Yankee facing ever east, a man who ventures beyond the Hudson River solely by Federal appointment."

The "platonic ideal" is later met, bound on all fours, dressed in a schoolboy's uniform and being dominated by a female student. This, just before the two of them are arrested for cocaine distribution.

Helen Hadley's clairvoyance allows the book to chronicle the amorous adventures of:

~ An American Indian scholarship student with clerical carnal knowledge in his Arizona past - the above-mentioned Silas.

~ A female Christian and mid-western music student who finds same sex love at the book's end

~ A devout Catholic boy who falls in love with Silas, but chooses an Italian monastery in which to live out his days

~ An Italian-American townie with a memorable male member, which is desired by both men and women

~ A 39-year-old mother of two who is returning to Yale for a French graduate degree and who adulterously indulges in the townie and the department chair

~ A feared female French professor who counsels, and engages in erotic fantasies with, her student Silas

~ A female French department student whose Helen Hadley Hall wedding is to a bisexual drama department functionary

. . . and many more.

In sum, the book is fun, erotic, well written and fast moving. Oh, that it describes even a small part of my New Haven days ! show less

I started and finished Sugarless in one day. I couldn't put it down. At first I was surprised by the level of sexual content (you never know what to expect in Early Review books), but the book absolutely grew on me after I got over my initial "I am on the train and I really hope a fellow passenger doesn't look over my shoulder and see this" reaction. The story is a great story about coming of age, a story about all the unavoidable things that make adolescence such a hard-to-navigate show more minefield: school, sex, friends, and family. James Magruder has a great writing style and pretty accurately depicts the lives and inner thoughts of high school sophomores, making these young people no more mature or more innocent than they would have been, realistically.

The basic outline of the book is that in 1974 the fifteen-year old main character, Rick Lahrem (rhymes with "harem"), is having trouble dealing with his parents' divorce and especially with his mother's remarriage to a man he hates, giving him a stepsister and a new half sister in the process. Just as he and his teachers discover that he has a particular talent for acting/speech making, Rick is also beginning to find that his newly maturing sexuality is more intently focused on men than on women.

There was only one aspect of the book that I did not like. The book is a story told by Rick from some time off in the future from the events of the book, but this is not clear from the beginning. Most of the book is told as if it is happening to the character while it is described, but occasionally and unexpectedly a "looking back" kind of sentence is inserted indicating that Rick is reminiscing about these events some years in the future. By the end of the book this is clear, but when it happens the first few times within the tale it can be jarring; it drops you out of the smoothly flowing story. show less

This is the "coming-of-age" story of high schooler Rick Lahrem. The book lacks a clear purpose, the plot is sketchy, and characterization is shallow. It's strongest in its portrayal of Rick's passion for speech (dramatic interpretation) but falls short in building believable relationships between characters. In particular, the treatment of Rick's relationship with an older man, a DI judge and speech coach from another school, feels off. Except for a mention that Rick longs to be loved, show more Magruder gives readers little idea of what goes through Rick's mind as he gets involved with a man more than double his age, a situation that feels uncomfortable to say the least. Considering all the time spent on describing various character's genitals, some characterization and glimpse into Rick's thought processes would be nice. Much of the humor relies on mocking characters who lives as one-sided stereotypes, such as the zealous evangelicals and "stoner sluts." I kept waiting for the story to come together, and in the end it did, but it felt forced. Not a book I'll read again. show less