Book Reviews

Book Blurb

What triggered two teenagers to savagely assault a man leaving a gay bar? What kind of men are they now in their 30s?

THE SCAR LETTERS follows Rudy Dallmann, who as a young man, is savagely beaten by two teenagers after leaving a gay bar.

Nearly twenty years later, Rudy, now 40, lives a single, isolated life in rural Massachusetts as a self-employed gardener. He never reported the crime and the memory of the attack and motive of his unknown assailants continues to haunt his present. Goaded by his best friend Tex, a major AIDS fundraiser and social activist, to finally “get on the record", Rudy decides to go further: He tracks these men down, one at a time, coming to terms with them and himself in the process.

 

Book Review

In this era full of headlines about the “normalization” of gay families, it’s nice to be entertainingly reminded that only a little more than a decade ago lesbians and gay men were bravely making strong, admirable families on their own without benefit of either clergy or the Supreme Court.  LGBT bonding is easier and fairer now that legalization has arrived in many locales, but the practice is really nothing new, as we’re reminded in Richard Alther’s graceful, big-hearted novel, set back in the 1990s, about a gay man in search of love, companionship and his own truest self. 

In his charming 2008 novel, The Decade of Blind Dates, Alther gave us a likeable gay man looking for the perfect partner on the Internet, and Alther deftly exploited the endless comic possibilities in that fraught exercise.  Although The Scar Letters is wonderfully witty, too, it opens with an incident that’s not funny at all.  Fresh out of college and working as a florist’s assistant, Rudy Dallmann is raped, beaten and scarred by two teenaged boys late at night in a public park.  The older and more sadistic of the pair carves two big F’s on Rudy’s chest, for fairy and faggot.  A bigoted cop blames Rudy, and he doesn’t even file a police report.  The scene as Alther writes it is beyond nightmarish and all too believable. 

Eighteen years later, in the same New England small city, Rudy’s physical scars have faded, but the mental damage hasn’t.  He’s a “vanilla plump” forty-year-old who’s happy in his work growing flowers, and producing “compost good enough to eat,” but too shy and insecure to seek out the man he’d love to share his good life with.  Rudy is still haunted by the attack (which happened after a visit to a gay bar) and lives in what his old friend Tex calls “self-protecting isolation.”

As drawn by Alther, a writer of both keen eye and nimble wit, Rudy and Tex are a memorable pair.  They had sex in college but soon lost interest in each other’s bodies and became life-long pals.  As in all rich friendships, it’s complicated.  Tex, who’s an ace fundraiser for an AIDS program, hectors Rudy about his letting two long-ago goons rule his emotional life. And Rudy insists to lithe, sexy Tex, who hops merrily from bed to bed, that he’s missing out on a lot by being “forever single, developing pecs instead of potential mates.”

It takes a while---the length of the novel, in fact---for Tex to accept  Rudy’s good advice and maybe settle down.  But Rudy sets out much sooner to overcome his own paralyzing anxieties by (a) responding to gay men who show a romantic interest in him and (b) confronting his demons---literally.  He actually tracks down the two perpetrators and confronts them.  The way Alther handles this dramatic development is entirely plausible, and it is riveting. 

Alert readers are going to see it coming, so it’s not really giving anything away to report that of the romantic relationships Rudy slips in and out of over the course of the novel---with a sexually confused piano teacher, with a man still in love with his dead long-time boyfriend, with an opportunistic aging flower child---it’s Stan Wentworth, one of Rudy’s two attackers, who in the end shows the most potential as a mate for Rudy.  (Bud Briggs, the older and more sadistic of the violent teens, is still a dangerous loser.)

Alther has a nice way of making his numerous secondary characters come instantly to life.  Wentworth’s laid-back ex-wife Grace and her girlfriend Jill, “a dwarf bratwurst about to explode,” are a vivid and recognizable pair.  Life is a serio-comic minefield for an “ex-gay” named Bryan who arranges a softball game involving gays, ex-gays, and ex-ex-gays, one of the funniest set pieces in the novel.  A bit less successful as a character is a psychotherapist named Jack with problems of his own.  He seems to be in the novel mainly as a device for Rudy to talk about his dismal early life being raised by his dour grandparents after his unruly parents died in a car crash.  There’s plenty of smart, colorful palaver in The Scar Letters, and the best of it is outside the clinical setting.

An effective device Alther uses to show where Bud Briggs’s homophobic malice comes from is an epigraph at the start of each chapter describing anti-gay atrocities throughout history.  Here’s an excerpt from an 18th century French legal encyclopedia: “The Swiss exercise extraordinary rigors against men guilty of this crime.  They cut off one limb after another in the course of several days---first an arm, then a thigh; when the body is a lifeless trunk it is thrown on the fire.”   Alther also includes a short made-up medieval saga that shows the savage homophobia and the sexual hypocrisy of an earlier age, as well as the love and decency gay people were capable of back then, even at the expense of their own lives. 

It’s lamentable that the great post-Stonewell gay lit revolution in the United States has largely petered out, but with writers like Richard Alther plugging away so winningly, that revolution’s spirit lives on. 

 
Richard Lipez is a journalist who writes the Don Strachey gay private eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson. You can find out more about him here.

 

Additional Information

Format	ebook and print
Length	Novel, 234 pages
Heat Level
Publication Date	01-October-2013
Price	$10.99 ebook, $16.95 paperback
Buy Link	https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-thescarletters-1313359-239.html