From Publishers Weekly
" 'I'm gay now,' Rae finally blurted.... 'Yea,' I nodded, 'me too, I guess.' " With this confession and self-revelation, Charlie Hope, the 18-year-old protagonist of Reed's bittersweet debut novel, experiences an emancipating epiphany. Born in the beer joint owned by his alcoholic grandfather, Chick, in the bleak town of Pryor, Okla., Charlie spends his boyhood accompanying Chick on a marathon bender through the bars and whorehouses of Tulsa. When Chick dies, 13-year-old Charlie is left to fend mostly for himself. Brought up in the confusing isolation of his pious, man-hating mother's home, the boy finds nothing to admire in the town's loutish male role models, most of whom work at Pryor Rendering, where the local slaughterhouse's discarded animal parts are melted down into lubricants and fertilizer. A friendship with Dewar, an opportunistic older inmate of the state-run correctional institution for incorrigible boys, initiates the acting-out of Charlie's disturbing secret sexual fantasies. After an alcoholic escapade at an Indian reservation, he is abandoned by Dewar to find his own way. This lyrical and hauntingly forthright novel avoids psychosocial analysis, offering instead poignant insights into the soul of a youth desperate for acceptance in a world filled with rejection.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A slow-paced, gay coming-of-age debut novel set in the working-class town of Pryor, an impoverished but colorful and spiritually rich corner of Oklahoma. Reed's title may strike some as a lousy pun, but the author links it, somewhat grimly, with an American small-town reality: It's the place where the parts of slaughtered cattle not sold as cuts of meat get shipped for ``rendering'' (i.e., transformation into salable items). Charlie Hope is 18, fatherless, and saddled with a fervently religious mother who's forever mythologizing Charlie's dead father. Luckily, Charlie also has a salt-of-the-earth grandfather, Chick, a crusty old sot whose bar is a local fixture and whose alcoholic expeditions with Charlie form an adventurous counterpoint to the boy's otherwise dreary existence. (Charlie's emerging homosexuality seems a minimal issue to him.) Charlie's discovery of Chick's dead body is the book's saddest, most starkly rendered moment. Enter Dewar, Charlie's first real lover, a terminal runaway from the Strang Home for Boys who steps in to fill the void in the narrative left by Chick's death. ``Once we had cracked the safe of our sexual attraction, we were surprisingly conservative in the divvying up and doling out of its illicit fortune,'' reports Charlie. The boys do some traveling; there's an odd, dreamy interlude that Charlie passes with a freakish local character known as the Turtle Man (because he carries turtle shells around in a sack, trying to sell them), and Dewar disappears. Along the way, Reed (by day a medical education coordinator in New York City) sustains his gentle, unpreachy characters on a steady diet of cigarettes and white-trash wisdom. His real strength lies in his effortless ability to wed dialogue with description, a particularly useful talent since his interest in plot seems limited. A near-perfect little tale, and a compelling alternative to the spate of gay epics that have lately inundated readers. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
