Book: Two Natures
Publisher: Saddle Road Press
Publication date: September 15, 2016
Length: 376 pages
Reviewed by Meredith
Synopsis
Jendi Reiter's debut novel offers a backstage look at the glamour and tragedy of 1990s New York City through the eyes of Julian Selkirk, an aspiring fashion photographer. Coming of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Julian worships beauty and romance, however fleeting, as substitutes for the religion that rejected him. His spiritual crisis is one that too many gay youth still face today. This genre-bending novel couples the ambitious political analysis of literary fiction with the pleasures of an unconventional love story. Vivid social realism, enriched by unforgettable characters, eroticism, and wit, make Two Natures a satisfying read of the highest sort.
Book will be 99 cents until September 28th!
Excerpt
[This excerpt is from the first chapter of Two
Natures, "Cross (1991)". Our
narrator, 19-year-old Julian Selkirk, has just moved to NYC from his hometown
of Marietta, GA, to study photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
He is hoping to have his first gay romance but has struck out, yet again, at
the club where his sophisticated new friends gather.]
Tucking my
hands in my pockets for warmth, I walked along Tenth Avenue, between the dark
slabs of office buildings and the blinding fluorescents of gas stations and car
dealerships. The working girls were out in their bolero ski jackets and fishnet
stockings. In the shadow of a doorway I stopped to watch them saunter up to
passing cars, headlights sweeping momentarily over their hard painted faces.
One of them spotted the flash of my ever-present camera and, fearing I was a
cop, hid behind her friend, a towering black girl who offered to do a variety
of illegal things to me in exchange for the film. I paid her fifty bucks and
let her pat me down for weapons, which hopefully she enjoyed more than I did.
"You
want to get inside someplace warm?" she suggested. She had a complex face,
wide Egyptian eyes ringed with mascara, bruised-plum lips touched at one corner
by a thin scar that streaked down to her mannish jawline.
"We could go back to my room,"
I ventured. I must not have been as sober as I thought. I figured I didn't have
anything worth stealing except my cameras, and in the unlikely event that she
knifed me, my family would probably be relieved that I'd found such a
straight-acting way to die.
The few dark, windy blocks back to
the dorm had never seemed so long. Could you get arrested for walking with a
girl whose skirt barely covered her butt cheeks? There was no way to make this
look like anything but what it wasn't. Fortunately, city style was a shifty
thing, unlike the strict seasonal palette and respectable hemlines of Mama's
cocktail-party set. The New York look was out of the corner of the eye, pretending
not to see, not to want to be seen.
Her stride was brisk and long,
making direct conversation difficult. "What's your name?" I spoke up
when we paused at a don't-walk sign.
"What do you want it to be?"
The husky tenor of her voice sounded worn, like an old cello rehearsing a
much-requested song.
"Uh...whatever it is?"
"Yeah, okay," she said
wearily. "Desirée." I heard the invisible quotes around the name,
clearly not hers, or not all the time. And we were on the move again, through
the wind tunnel of high buildings flanking the narrow street.
"Look," I said, when we'd
reached the warmth of the dormitory lobby, "I'm not like those other guys.
I don't even, uh, have sex with girls."
She stared at the elevator panel. "Greek
style, cost you fifty bucks extra."
"No, no," I said, peering
nervously down the brightly lit hallway for fear that someone would hear us. "What
I meant was, I only want to take some pictures of you for my class. With your
clothes on. Well, not your clothes, but clothes.
Okay?"
"Uh-huh." The numbers
could have been television, she watched them that intently, counting down till
the doors opened for us on the lobby level.
I thought the costumes would cheer
her up, bright props I was always gathering in anticipation of a suitable
wearer. She had a Mardi Gras face, regal and sensual, meant to be softened by
purple and gold plumes. I draped the fake feathers around her shoulders, stiff
in a yellow brocade jacket whose frayed underarms only showed if she moved the
wrong way. Despite our conversation in the lobby, she kept rubbing her leg up
against mine when I got too close.
"You sure you don't like girls?"
she purred. "Maybe you just need a nice girl to show you how to have a
good time."
"No, thank you," I said,
because my Mama raised me to be polite, even to the type of woman she pretended
didn't exist outside of the Bible. I could smell Desirée's musky skin and
floral hairspray. How was I made, that I was unmoved by her scent — repulsed,
even, to imagine the overlay of touch upon touch that had gone into it, like
fingerprints on a greasy doorknob?
I stepped back. The colors were
festive and rich, perfect against her dark skin, as I'd imagined. She stood
like a bright bird unaware that it could fly. She needed to see herself, I
thought, then she would be proud. I positioned her by the mirror on the closet
door. "Okay, pose," I encouraged her. Like a kitten stalking its
reflection, she leaned toward it, tipping out her cleavage, pouted her puffed
violet lips and mimed French-kissing herself.
"No, not a sex pose...like a
model," I tried to explain. "You like fashion magazines? You know, Elle, Vogue, Glamour?"
"Do you work for a magazine?"
I thought I heard a little excitement there.
"Well, not yet. But maybe
someday."
"Oh, okay. Okay. How about
this?" She propped one stiletto boot heel on our sagging armchair, angled
her hands on her hips, and flashed me her idea of a Hollywood smile. I snapped
some pictures to please her, but her expressions remained exaggerated and
false, a drugstore version of a luxury perfume. If you like Cindy, you'll love Desirée.
"Let's try something different,"
I suggested. I helped her into a drop-waisted cocktail dress in a sugary pink.
Like my other thrift-shop finds, this one had been cast off for showing signs
of wear: the constellation of seed pearls at the neckline showed some gaps, and
one or two of the skirt's fluttery overlapping petals were frayed at the
bottom, as if snagged by an exuberant dancing heel. Actually, I supposed the
only thing it had going for it was the color, defiantly feminine and optimistic
in a city of grays, designed to awaken a hidden nostalgia for Easter bonnets
and Princess phones. It wouldn't zip all the way up Desirée's broad back, but
you couldn't really tell when she was reclining on Dmitri's bed. I asked her to
rest her head on the pillow.
"Talk to me," I said.
"You're such a naughty boy,"
she said. "I bet you have a big, hard..."
"Please, stop." I put down
my camera. "Talk to me about something you like. Not sex," I quickly
added.
Her eyes searched the room for
answers. I resumed clicking away, hoping to catch that moment when the mahogany
angles of her face softened into dreaming. But there's the wonder and stupidity
of my profession, the promise that a dress as pink as a birthday cake can roll
back the clock to girlhood, simple as that.
"I like bubble baths," she
droned on, "French restaurants, dancing at the club..." Her
wristwatch beeped and she sat up. "You want another half hour? Twenty
dollars."
Since I'd already spent both of the
fifties Mama had smuggled into this month's letter from home — on booze and
cheap women, no less — I had to decline.
Getting out of bed, she noticed for
the first time the poster on Dmitri's side of the room. "That's a nice
picture of Jesus. Did you do that?"
I shook my head vehemently. "It's
my roommate's. I mean, it's not by him. Andres Serrano took it. A famous guy."
I gathered up the clothes she'd come in with. "Here's your stuff."
She didn't take the bundle I thrust
at her. "Can I use the toilet?"
"Sure, go to town." I
dropped her skirt and ski jacket back on the floor.
Our bathroom door was warped and
didn't latch properly. This wasn't usually a problem for me and Dmitri, as we
were rarely home at the same time and equally uninterested in seeing each other
naked. Despite myself, I caught a glimpse of pink gauze over brown thigh and was
compelled to linger. Had I ever actually seen a vagina, outside of health-class
videos and my brother's stolen magazines? Casually, I edged toward the door and
brushed my shoulder against it, nudging it open a bit wider than I'd intended.
The pink dress was rucked up over her round hips. The curve of her belly
descended into a patch of dark fur that did not make it into the picture I
submitted as that week's homework assignment in Intro to Fashion Photography
for a much-needed B-plus, a picture of that moment before the shocked modesty
of her wide brown eyes became cool and unreadable as a doll's gaze. I tipped
her another five singles and she left.
Alone at last, I switched off the
light and lay down in bed, but an oppressive presence filled the room. It was
thick as the red-gold billows surrounding the crucifix on the poster, that she
hadn't known was urine. Even in the dark I couldn't forget it was there, and
every night that I coexisted with it, it confirmed my buried fears about the
choices that had led me here, making my guts knot up with a pang of shame.
What harm had Jesus ever done, that
anyone should want to piss on him? In our family's Baptist church we'd learned
to sing "I Dreamed I Drove the Nails". The preacher groaned about the
spitting soldiers and the crown of thorns while I studied Daddy's confident
face at the altar call. The bruises on his knuckles weren't from work. And the
painted Jesus smiled over us from his hill of clouds, victorious and clean,
tender shepherd of other people's children. Kneeling in silent anger on the
carpeted steps, I'd wanted to give Jesus a broken arm like mine, Carter's black
eye, our little sister Laura Sue's fingernails nervously bitten down to blood.
But that only proved I was my father's son.
I'd parted ways with that Jesus
years ago, or tried to. Serrano's soiled crucifix forced me to recall the one
my French-Catholic Uncle Jimmy, Mama's brother, had given me from his curio
shop in Savannah. We'd moved in with him and Memère for a month when I was ten,
till Daddy wooed Mama back with roses and a remodeled kitchen. On the worst
nights, that scrawny, dented carving in my hand had allowed me to pretend there
was a different Jesus, one who had no super-powers and couldn't help anyone,
but would keep me company. I imagined feeling his presence like a warm breath,
a feather-weight on my pillow. Sometimes I let him say to me, I love you, Julian, I've always loved you.
But later I felt ashamed that this was childish, and then that it was something
worse. Something too close to the half-seen men who embraced me in dreams that
left my sheets sticky. So I had to lose that Jesus as well.
The degraded image on Dmitri's wall
seemed to mock my boyish wish to protect Jesus from my unclean thoughts. If
what the preachers said about Christ's two natures was true, I didn't know how
he could stand his life anyhow, being split down the middle between the part of
him that remembered heaven and the human part that would have touched me back.
This drunken soul-searching,
however, had to be weighed against the more immediate problem of ridicule from
my roommate whenever I hinted that I didn't appreciate the decor. Last time, he'd
pretended to ignore me, blowing cigarette smoke out of his nostrils, his eyes
half-closed behind his thick black-framed rectangular glasses, and then later
he and his friends made sure I overheard them calling me "Jesse Helms"
in a fake Southern yokel voice. So I tossed and turned on my bed, and dreamed
about processing drywall invoices for Daddy's company.
Review
Many of us remember the early 90's and how AIDS was actually vocal. Yes, it had been around for years before but it wasn't really until the 90's that people talked about it. Many people suffered and died because of this virus. This book not only addresses AIDS and that time period but you are gutted at the loss of one character because of the virus. That is the only warning you're getting about the seriousness and emotional upheaval in this book.
This tale is close to 400 pages long but it flowed. Pacing was terrific and the characters were fleshed out nicely. There's a high angst count on this story obviously so be ready.
You may walk away from this book angry and frustrated and that is really just a testament to the realism the author creates. The truth here is a beacon for awareness. Take a deep breath and be ready for an emotional pummeling.
About the Author
Jendi Reiter's poetry and fiction are guided by her
belief that people take precedence over ideologies. In exploring themes of
queer family life, spiritual integration, and healing from adverse childhood
experiences, her goal is to create understanding that leads to social change.
Raised by two mothers on the Lower East Side of
New York City, she grew up in a home full of books. Early poetic idols were
W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Anne Sexton. Her literary role model was Jane Eyre.
As a teenager, she learned from Jean Auel's The
Valley of Horses that erotic literature could contain a utopian vision of
gender freedom and egalitarian relationships. She began publishing poetry
professionally as a high school senior when her poem was reprinted in Best American Poetry, and other publications
soon followed in journals such as Poetry
and The Lyric.
Two Natures,
her debut novel, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in 2016. Her published poetry
collections are Bullies in Love
(Little Red Tree Publishing, 2015), Barbie
at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010), Swallow
(Amsterdam Press, 2009), and A Talent for
Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003). In 2010 she received a Massachusetts
Cultural Council Artists' Grant for Poetry. Awards include the 2015 Wag's Revue
Poetry Prize, the 2013 Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize, the 2012
Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry from Descant magazine, the 2011 James Knudsen
Editor's Prize in Fiction from Bayou Magazine, the 2011 OSA Enizagam Award for
Fiction, the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize, and second prize in the 2010 Iowa
Review Awards for Fiction.
In 2001 Jendi and her husband Adam R. Cohen founded
Winning Writers, an online resource site for creative writers. Their free email
newsletter provides over 50,000 subscribers with profiles of the best free
literary contests. Winning Writers also sponsors four annual contests for humor
poetry, self-published books, general-interest poetry, and short fiction and
essays. The site has been named one of the "101 Best Websites for Writers"
(Writer's Digest, 2015) and one of the "100 Best Websites for Writers"
(The Write Life, 2016).
Prior to becoming a full-time writer and editor,
Jendi wrote business news articles for a reference publishing company and
clerked for an appeals court judge in New York City. Her book reviews and
editorials appeared in the New York Law
Journal and National Law Journal,
and she published several articles in academic legal journals on such topics as
pregnancy discrimination in the workplace and the free speech implications of
trademark law.
Website: http://www.jendireiter.com
Twitter: @JendiReiter
Book trailer on YouTube: http://bit.ly/twonaturestrailer
Goodreads (see reviews on this page): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30080524-two-natures
Reviews:
Giveaway
Jendi Reiter will gift 5 people copies of Two Natures
They will be sent to your kindles so please be aware.
Contest will end on September 22nd!
Thank you and good luck!
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