OUTLINE OF MY LOVER
by Douglas A. Martin
(Soft Skull Press) $12

It may seem eerie that I am writing this review while watching a VH-1 special
on groupies. But then, isn’t everyone a sucker for celebrity fantasy? Douglas
A. Martin is catering to the masses. This young vagabond has written an elusive
(though easy to figure out), fictional kiss-and-tell about his relationship
with R.E.M.’s shy mumbler, Michael Stipe. The fact that Martin co-authored a
book with Stipe two years ago (the haiku year) is another clue giving
Martin away.

But this book isn’t meant to be a puzzle. Martin starts poetically, recalling his young family life in the South, and gradually digs deeper as he grapples with his obsession with the always-traveling rock star. It’s hard to tell if he’s attracted because of the celebrity or if he’d rather have a low-key boyfriend. Sure, he doesn’t mind the new clothes and vacations, but he has trouble with his older lover’s friends and public image. The shaky relationship lasts about three years before the singer calls it off, leaving our devoted hero feeling even more like an outcast in his town.

Amid chunky segments that read like journal entries, there are some beautiful gems of cerebral longing, and Martin’s disregard for commas makes the language flow in a charged stumble. But in the end, Martin, like his novel, comes off as a tease. KEVIN SAMPSELL

 

GO VERY HIGHLY TRIPPINGLY TO AND FRO and THE STRETCH RUN
by Raymond DeCapite
(Sparkle Street Books) $15

No amount of racetrack action, cheap bourbon, and Genessee Cream Ale would
make me want to live in Cleveland. As told by Raymond DeCapite in these short
novels, the place is a hell of simple declarative sentences. In The Stretch
Run, the important fact that one character’s son died in the Vietnam War
sets the clock of this timeless place; in Go Very Highly, a lament about
an old neighborhood that was wiped out by an interstate highway takes care of
this bit of business. The men live on lousy coffee and boilermakers, throw themselves
into precarious romantic attachments with difficult women and even more precarious
romantic non-sexual attachments with other men, and subsist on a diet of donuts,
grilled rib eye, and cheap but swank Italian food. Somehow the women keep up
with them, negotiating snappy-patter courtships. This is a world where you go
to the last night-game of baseball season and leave in the fourth inning because
it’s too boring.

Dismal as the Cleveland Indians were in the 1970s, the amusements to be had at Thistledown’s racetrack must have been positively captivating. The gambling scenes depict various habitual players of the ponies, football pools, and poker games. Few get anywhere. The most successful character in these stories has left Cleveland to be an actor, winds up in the running for a role on a TV pilot, and returns home to, it seems, seduce his brother’s girlfriend.

Although the plots of these stories are as predictable as lust, their resolutions are as complex as love. DeCapite, a playwright, works well within the restrictions he has set for himself in this Cleveland where, as one character says, “Most of the young people move away. They move away the first chance they get. We live on scraps. Scraps of green. Scraps of blue. Scraps of conversation.” DOUG NUFER