Customer Reviews

In the City of Shy Hunters: A Novel

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To paraphrase William Parker, the narrator of this amazing new novel, You're going this way, something happens, then you're going that way.

If you haven't read *The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon*, then you're in for an extra treat because you can now read two wonderful novels. Reading *In the City of Shy Hunters* over the last week has been a beautiful, joyous, heartbreaking experience. Unless you are a really tiny-hearted person, you will probably fall in love with this book, just as the book's narrator, Will Parker, "William of Heaven", tells you right off the bat that he has fallen in love with you. (He means it.) The vision that informs this book (as well as TS'searlier books, but here on a near epic scale ) is unlike any other in American fiction. It is huge, mystical, generous, "sexually haunted," erotic, and deeply spiritual.

If you believe in the power of books and poems, music and art in general to reflect and renew what Wallace Stevens called "the voice that is great within us," then you will be glad that Tom Spanbauer is in the world, and grateful for his generosity and hard work as a writer and as a human being. Please read this book. *Mitakuye iyasin!*

This is the long-awaited new novel by Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, a novel which got me into semi-deep trouble when I selected it for a book discussion group once. Spanbauer is just NOT an easy author. Not for suburban matrons, no, no, no... Definitely a stylistic challenge (there are no quotation marks anywhere, so you have to parse it out in your head as you read) and the material and setting have certainly been used before (the joys and agonies of New York City at the beginning of the Age of AIDS), but there's a definite attraction meshed in with all its difficulties. The flashbacks to the narrator's strange, abusive childhood in Idaho are lovely and touching, and the characters are nothing if not memorable---performance artists, homeless people, wannabees and waiters. There are multitudinous references to Native American and Western American culture---Stranger in a Strange Land goes 80's, told in a late 90's style---which inform and propel the narrative and the characters' motivations.

It's not like anything all that stellar actually happens---Will is looking for a childhood friend who got a scholarship and moved to NYC years before---and his quest is filled with blind alleys and, of course, with self-discovery. There's a good deal of violence and queasy-making descriptions of edgy sexual encounters and acres and acres of humankind's-inhumanity-to-humankind, but there's also a warped beauty to the whole thing and moments of sincere love. Imagine Tales of the City directed by Sam Peckinpah in a benevolent mood...

I waited, and waited, and WAITED for the release of this, Tom Spanbauer's third novel (all good things to those who wait!). A lot has passed in the 10 years since the release of Spanbauer's incredible "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," but by some ethereal craft, he has managed (again) to bring his readers to a very special place he knows, and we love--where things exist, dream-like/life-like, on several planes at once. Here, he again shares with us stories of a few more of those who are, and always will be there--loved by us. If you believe in magic, and in the pathos that life brings to all of us, then you, too, will fall deep (hey! even deeper than that!) into the story of what happens to sweet, sweet William, and the people he knows and loves. The joy and sorrow of modern American living and loving plays out on these pages like an ancient Greek tragedy--it is the stuff that timeless tales are made of. It is the stuff of eternity...

Something like a mixture of Dancer from the Dance, Huckleberry Finn, and Gravity's Rainbow, this book is not going to be for everyone. But if you like storytelling, philosophy and style, you may just love it. I do.

The author has a unique voice, and I can understand people who have trouble with it (skip the prologue if you do). The book tells a good if classic story, but it's also an exploration of perception, memory and reality. It understands that since events exist by perception, their geography is in memory, not in time. As in life, the absurd and the tragic and the sanctimonious and the sentimental all crowd in on one another; but the characters are fascinating, and I found it easy to get caught up in their lives.

The comic scenes are masterful; my favorite is one in a crowded laundromat, where the narrator tries to guard a finally-available washing machine from other aggressive new yorkers while his laundry remains out of reach.

I liked this book because it told a good story and made me think.

People say that Spanbauer, one of my favorite novelists, took so long writing this book because he planned it as his last testament, and that the manuscript mounted up to a magic mountain of pages, enough to dwarf a Thomas Pynchon or a David Foster Wallace. Cold heads at Grove Press prevailed and insisted on cutting the MS down to its present state, where it sort of just sits there, neither fish nor fowl, a sketch for a grander Balzacian social tragedy, like James McCourt's subsequent QUEER STREET but with an actual plot. What we have now is still pretty amazing, but don't you wish that novels were treated like movies and that we might someday hope for the "director's cut" of ITCOSH, with its lofty architectronics restored to us the way the writer wanted us to have it?

Perhaps in years to come a scholarly edition will be prepared, for Spanbausr probably has the missing sections somewhere? Can I do it? If there's a committee, count me in! I cried and cried all the way through the Will Parker story, and his hunt for Charlie the missing lost boy keeps the novel going through some dangerous backwaters. I didn't exactly fall in love with Rose, the glamorous transvestite character, I kept thinking of "Angel" the one from the musical RENT; however "Rose" is supposed to be more of an intellectual, a Dorothy Dean type with yet oodles of sex appeal and every trick in the book.

Many great novels have been written on the restaurant theme, and perhsps it's Spanbauer's concentration on this setting that, for me, evokes the glory days of Balzac and the 19th century passion for knowing everything and educating one's readers in the process. This book takes place during the days when AIDS and HIV were still unfamiliar to most people, even to proto sophisticated New Yorkers, when a man in the AIDS ward might not be able to count on his own parents visiting him (here, one of them is told that "my son died long ago"), and even one's own friends might draw back for fear of breath-drawn transmission. The heartbreak and the courage it took to go on in those days make for a stirring story, and even if the rumor isn't true, even if Spanbauer wanted his book to be exactly this size, he took a giant subject and smashed holes in it everywhere, like someone inside a pumpkin compelled to make a jack o'lantern--punching outwards, and shining with a weird, eternal fire.

The "shy hunters" of the title in Tom Spanbauer's most recent novel are apparently those reluctant heroes among us who, once pushed to the fore, are capable of great feats of, if not heroism, then at least of affirmation. One such "hero," is Will Parker, who comes to New York from Idaho in 1983 in search of his friend, lover, and blood-brother, Charlie 2 Moons, whom he once betrayed in a moment of cowardice that has haunted him for two decades. He is destined to spend six years in New York, at a time of crisis that demands sacrifice, not just from Will, but from his assortment of colorful friends, including perhaps the most tragic, Roosevelt Washington King, a one-time English professor cum drag queen/performance artist (and close friend of Elizabeth Taylor), who, having contracted AIDS, plans to exit this world in a "lucid compulsion to act polemically." The action comes to a head for Will in a violent confrontation with an equestrian cop in Tompkins Square Park. By this time, Will has "found" Charlie 2 Moons, lost one lover to suicide and another to madness, and seen his world nearly emptied of friends by AIDS. This work represents a remarkable tight-rope walk for its author, as he veers between tragic realism and quotidian farce. But, whereas he accomplished this feat quite nimbly in "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," here he often wavers. Perhaps he identifies too closely with "Will of Heaven," who is described as either a "handsome Einstein or intelligent Tom Selleck." A glance at Spanbauer's picture on the back cover of my book reveals this as a spot-on description of the author himself, perhaps with a little Gene Shalit thrown in. Spanbauer contracted AIDS while writing this book, which is a labor of love, dedicated to those who "have passed through the Door of the Dead." If good intentions were enough, this would be a masterpiece. As it is, "The City of Shy Hunters" is less of a novel than a collection of brilliant set-pieces, many of which will haunt the reader forever. For all its talk of suicide and death, its ultimate message is a positive one ("a kind of ... joy"), which gives us hope that the "extra lovely" Mr. Spanbauer has a lifetime of writing left to do.

We are introduced to Will Parker, boy from Idaho, as he journeys to the Wolf Swamp (Manhattan) in search of a lost love.

During the course of the novel, he learns that it is his task, metaphorically speaking, to "Slay the monster, and rescue the maiden." I like the uncertainty at the end of the book whether he has been able to accomplish either of those goals, because it makes the point that reality isn't as neat as the stories we tell about it. We can create the stories, but the reality itself is more chaotic and never fully explainable.

On another level, the book is easy to understand. Boy moves to city, boy finds self and falls in love, boy's friends get AIDS and die. Although this plot line is somewhat of a cliche, and truly heartbreaking, the vivid characterizations and passions of the characters in their life make it a book about living rather than about dying.

This is one you'll ponder for a long time.

Readers who have already experienced The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon do not need to be told that Tom Spanbauer can write a stunning and excruciating book. But I do think that they will find In the City of Shy Hunters to be more stunning and more excruciating than even that earlier work.

Without saying too much, this is a novel that any serious student of literature or culture cannot afford to ignore, and I hope it finds an audience far wider than that. Buy it, read it, lend it to your mother. A great, great writer is among us and publishing books and we had better not let them go unnoticed.

At the March 2009 meeting of the NYC LGBT Center book discussion group, we had a nice sized group read and discuss "In the City of Shy Hunters" by Tom Spanbauer.

Most of us thought that it was hard to get started, but once you did -- Hold on for a wild ride through the East Village in the 1980s. Why was it hard to get started? The language is repetitive and "machine-gun like." Why was it such a wild ride? The novel gallops from Idaho flashbacks (which most found very touching) to various episodes in the East Village involving real New Yorkers of the period: performance artists, drug addicts, waiters, alcoholics, Native Americans, drag queens (of various ilks), lots of homeless people, a family from Connecticut, and one naive but well-meaning and ultimately
very knowledgeable narrator. The novel ends with many deaths from AIDS (but it took a while to get to the AIDS part of the story) and the infamous Tompkins Square Riots.

Some thought that the writing style was completely self indulgent and irritating and the characters pasteboard thin and unsympathetic. I think that by the end of the discussion, those of us who liked the novel and those who didn't found more in the story than they originally thought. Not an easy read - but a great portrait of a period, told in the style of one who was there.

This was a tough read for many - but a good book for a discussion group.

I didn't want to read anything else by Spanbauer for fear it would taint the standing of my favorite fiction, "The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon". "In the City of Shy Hunters" didn't take over that position, but it was a compelling, poignant, heartbreakingly beautiful story, told with realism and fancy. A necessary addition to any library.