Thomas Grattan

Gordon, dumped by his first real boyfriend, goes to New York, and after a stint as a grocery clerk, is offered a job as a dog walker by a friend of just about the only friends he's made in NY, the lesbian Janice, with whom he lives. This leads him to the elderly Phillip and the aging Nicola, who hire him as an assistant, and he finds himself pretty clueless culturally, if not sexually, in a well-off artistic circle. The sex is frequent, plainly described at a remove, seemingly immediately show more satisfying and affirming, and mostly discounted once done. Gordon is snarky but not overly so, and there are things he learns fast but don't seem to matter to him, and things he struggles with that do. The life of a young gay man in the early 21st century seems full of opportunities to blow.
The book reads easily enough if you don't balk at frequent sex acts named but not much described, a serving of angst-laden longing, and yet another protagonist that welcomes pain and risk as an escape from being in his own head. Too bad reading doesn't do it for him. show less

The Publisher Says: A young gay man upends the lives of a powerful art-world couple in this steamy novel of self-discovery.

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon―handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction―takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of show more two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him―and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I kept making dirty wordplay on this title as my review's first line. Trouble with that is nothing I can come (!) up (!) with is steamier or hornier than the book itself is.

This is NOT straight-people safe. This is not, in all honesty, a book to read at work, or on public transport, unless you're wearing very, very loosely pleated trousers. Or baiting your hook.

It's also not one-handed reading, I hasten to add. The story is very much the point of the sexual situations, not the other way around. Think of it as Ripley made for PornHub not Netflix, nor perish forbid that neutered but pretty-to-look-at theatrical film. That perhaps overplays the calculation and manipulation that Gordon commits to in achieving his goal of finding himself (between two powerful people's bodies), and discovering his true inner self(ish bastard). But make no mistake that Gordon is very much a Young Man from the Provinces who very clearly knows what he left behind he deliberately rejected. Now he needs to understand how to work his natural gifts while he's got youth and a complete absence of the will to say "no" on his side.

The reason I resonated so deep(!)ly to the story is Author Grattan's way of making it: Episodic, dreamlike, in the flow. That knocked off the meaner interpretations I leapt to about Gordon's thoughtlessness, his lack of a core concern for how his behavior might affect others. It is not yet in him (!) to be calculating. It is, in other words, a case of his being canny versus being savvy. Gordon instinctively responds to the way others see him and shows them that side. A savvy operator would, instead move to seduce those who have what he wants. Those people are often false-feeling and mistrusted, Gordon is too real in his desire to be desired to give off a warning signal, a fake vibe.

Absence of an organizing principle often gets mistaken for aimlessness. Author Grattan takes on a daunting task of presenting the story of Gordon, void of course, and needing thus to use authorial sleight of hand to keep his reader from feeling lost and unconnected the way Gordon is. That is a supremely difficult thing to do. For the most part I think his choice of sexual contexts serves admirably to ground and connect us to Gordon. There's so much pleasure in reading the elegant prose of the story, and so much about the emotional nature of those around Gordon to keep a lit-fic reader going. Particularly telling is Gordon's relations with the old guys in the story. He might not lust after them as they do him, but he desires...something, some meaningful intangible benefit to go with the tangible exchanges between them; does he get it? He doesn't know, because he doesn't know what he's looking for, The older men get what they want though likely not what they need, which is again intangible: connection. A future. Raising more than a flagging half-staff, shall we say.

This is consonant with my own life.

My half-star docked off dissatisfaction was Gordon's religious father begging for his son's withdrawn love. That's not so baldly expressed, of course, as I've done but it honestly does not ring true at all. Religious fathers with gay sons imght want to convert them to straightness but making themselves emotionally vulnerable? Nope. I don't, honestly, see that happening between most any father and son. And that joined a certain vague sense I could never coalesce around an actual idea, that Gordon was not really interested in himself enough to attract the caliber of men he does. That's as close as I can come to articulating a kind-of Forrest Gumpishness about him that did not jibe with narrative.

Lovely writing made the ending work. Lesser talent would've fumbled that one, and it was a close-run thing even so. A book I recommend to gay-male readers of literary prose.

All others, at your own risk. show less

This is a moving portrait of a young gay man making his way in New York City, accompanied by an interesting network of friends and acquaintances. The story drew me in right away in a way that similar gay fiction has rarely done for me. This was in part because the narrator reminded me of Philip Carey in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, one of my favorite novels.

It is a perceptive examination of class, family, and gay men's inheritance across generations. Gordon, the main character, is a show more twenty-four-year-old man who was raised in Minneapolis by discordant working-class parents. He leaves for New York City in 2001, just before the 9/11 attacks, after being dumped by his boyfriend, using $200 he stole from him. He eventually secures a job walking dogs for the wealthy Philip and Nicola, the owners of an art gallery. They quickly requested that he work as their personal assistant. The author uses this couple to illustrate the way of life of the extremely wealthy. While Philip is aloof and patrician, Nicola, the younger member of the couple, appears to be resentful of Gordon's presence. Before he makes a mistake that will end the close bond between the three of them, Gordon still has a lot to learn about navigating the complexities of their sophisticated lives.

For the majority of the book, Gordon is reckless and impish. However, he slowly matures, while his memories of his early misadventures continue to bother him. Gordon's voice is dark, humorous, and ultimately reprimanding, making him a remarkable narrator. Though Gordon learns to control himself rather than wreaking more havoc, the book builds on the self-absorbed, occasionally cruel protagonists similar to those of Edmund White's earlier works. show less

I changed my mind about this book several times while I was in the process of reading it - ultimately I went from thinking it was just okay to thinking it was amazing. Told in short, clipped and understated sentences, it rather resembles a book in translation. So much of the book is revealed not by what is written as by what is left unsaid. The obvious love and romance in the story come across as unsentimental - clipped just like the book's sentences. A multi-generational story, it captures show more a wonderful array of feelings and emotions that all seem very genuine. What might otherwise be interpreted as often being cold and austere, ends up revealing itself to be an exploration of a transcendent empathy. Highly recommended. show less