Customer Reviews

The Gay Place

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Written by a former member of President LBJ's staff. It's no secret that Lady Bird Johnson did not like this "too close to home" novel that most say was based in part on her famous husband.

However, the true gem in these pages is an acurate account of the style of Texas politics during this time period. It honestly reflects what life in this arena was like from someone who was there to see it for himself.

When this novel was released, the author Billy Lee Brammer was touted as the next great American writer. That prediction never came true due to the tragedy in the author's own life. We are left with this first work and a wonder of what might have followed had the author's life followed a more positive path.

Newcomers to Texas politics are often told to read The Gay Place if they want to understand Texas politics and a land where politics is best described by the words of former Governor Ann Richards...."IN TEXAS...POLITICS IS A CONTACT SPORT!"

This story tells of a state where men and women most often rise to the top through their intelligence and skill and not their bloodline. It certainly is not a tale of wealthy trust-fund princes who merely walk through doors open by their fathers.

You can feel the humid summer heat of Austin and the sexy passion of it's people as these pages unfold. While this wonderful city has changed dramatically in the past thirty years, you can still find many of the story's locations full of Texas politicos and their groupies. A well written and entertaining novel.

In the 500 plus pages of this remarkable trilogy, Billy Lee Brammer does more to explicate and evaluate American politics, especially Texas politics and even more especially, populist politics as practiced by Lyndon B.Johnson, than all the ponderous Caro-type analyses that weigh us down blur the color and cloy the flavor. More than a portrait of LBJ, the book is an artful depiction of the lure of politics and its terrible cost on those who pursue it. All this is conveyed with humor, sympathy and a clear-eyed vision of the American scene of the 60's.

A wonderful trilogy. This is a gem of a book, and desrves a much wider audience than it's received to this point (but then, it's only been in print for 37 years). Not only is it a masterful series of short novels about politics, it also does a wonderful job of capturing the feel of a time and place.

This is a wonderful trilogy of novels on state politics. Though they seem disjointed, they are unified around the shadowy figure of the governor, who lurks in the background manipulating people and events down to the minutest detail. Thus, the immediate action taking place is a kind of epiphenomenon, all players that are living chess pieces in the governor's grand game, which is never fully explained: that is the real art of this novel, that it leaves far more unsaid than explicitely stated. The reader has to connect the dots.

In the first novel, the governor has chosen a young legislator for an unaccustomed role in the spotlight: his life, like those of his cohorts, is a mess of alcohol and libertinism, but he is also struggling with his conscience to do the right thing. There are so many layers to what was really happening that it is impossible to explain, because the reader can only suspect what the governor is doing. The governor mixes the most intimate personal machinations, it appeared to me, with a legislative purpose and to depose (even destroy) a potential rival. It reminds me, of course, of LBJ, a politician without equal. One of the really interesting aspects is that the author describes many people just like GW Bush: priviledged, brash, debauched, and inadvertantly wondering what they should be doing. If you read this, you will understand GW Bush and his milieu much better - that is a sign of the timelessness of Bramer's achievement, truly a masterpiece.

The second novel is similar: the governor's enemies are defeated, while he stages and manipulates events to suit whatever his purposes are. It is at times brutal and sad, yet funny and even uplifting, particularly in the scenes of introspection, when the characters have flashes of insight and empathy. The plot, which is only a vehicle to expose cryptic motvations, is the governor attempting to get an appointed young senator to run for a true popular mandate - he is a complex and flawed character, whom the governor sponsors out of respect but also to keep him in his pocket. It is splendidly ambiguous, as is all politics. The third involves similar personal struggles and an ineviablle passing of power, again, very realistic and down to earth. Marriages are destroyed, while politics plays in, and the characters wallow in existential angst while working very hard and yet hardly understanding why. It is a unique combination of themes, a genuine work of literature.

One thing that really fascinated me was how similar this is to a Gore Vidal novel, a kind of comedy of the priviledged who inadvertently do politics while living their complicated lives. The political action is entirely off stage, but solved in their everyday actions and affairs and drunken parties. I have no doubt that Vidal carefullly studied the literary method that Bramer pioneered here, which resulted in his truly fine series of novels on American politics. Finally, tt really is where Bush came from, a reflection on the depth of Bramer's art, almost prescient in its intelligence and lack of facile scrutiny.

Warmly recommended as great art and a unique view into politics.

I certainly second all that has been said here about the political aspects of this remarkable work. But for an Austin native like me, the descriptions of downtown, Scholz Garden, the hill country and west Austin resonate to my core. I have two copies in my personal library. If there could be required reading for anyone who moves here, this book should be at the top of the list. I'll admit, sometimes when I need a mood elevator, I reach for this book and open it to a random page.

The Gay Place is a winner in so many ways: an absorbing, deep novel, a historical novel about a key time in our history, an accurate an perceptive regional novel (about my home town, Austin!) and, the best novel on American, or maybe any, politics ever written. Billy Lee Brammer was a speech writer for Lyndon Johnson who was fascinated by the world where a sentence could start with high minded political goals and end in crude bullying. A world where bribery, humiliation and blackmail were tools of the trade, often for worthy purposes. A must-read American classic that grows in reputation as time passes.

Not just LBJ, this book is about politics and the ways of power. Very well written, insightful and lyric, it might be the best kept secret in political fiction. On a side note--man did people drink a lot then. Its amazing.

Anyone who loves writing and politics will enjoy this book.

Billy Lee Brammer's THE GAY PLACE deserves its acclaim as one of the great political novels. Brammer beautifully--and that really is the right word to describe Brammer's ear for dialogue--recreates the political world of 1950s Texas of which LBJ was the undisputed king. Governor Arthur Genstemaker is pure LBJ, so much so that one gets the sense that this novel was must reading for Robert Caro when Caro set out to write the definitive biography of the one time president. What is also obvious with the book is how much politics is not a happy place, that the lives of the participants are empty, that relationships are ruined, and that alocohalism and unfaithfulness are givens.
It is anything but a gay place.

Why not then a five star review given the praise above? The three pieced together extended stories--"The Flea Circus," "Room Enough to Caper," and "Country Pleasures"--really should have been novels each on their own. In extending each, Brammer would have been able to work through some of his pacing issues and also the conclusion to "Room Enough to Caper."

I might have gone with four stars if not for the format of three interlocking novellas. I would have preferred one long, fully connected story. The three novels revolve around the LBJ-like Texas governor Arthur Fenstermaker, although he is, oddly, almost a minor character in the first two novels. They focus more on the younger, less influential political players in the governor's orbit. When Fenstermaker does make an appearance, he demonstrates the raw power of the good ol' boy network of politicking.

All of the novels follow the self-inflicted downward spiral of the '50s-era Austin-tatious new rich, in all their debauched and vulgar incarnations. These were people who had started out in a highly idealistic, progressive political movement. They dissolved their lofty liberal hopes for the nation in an endless wash of booze and general moral degradation.

Billy Brammer was a staffer for Lyndon B. Johnson, so I have no doubt this is an accurate fictionalization of the time and place. Brammer was a fine writer with a special ability to probe the minds and hearts of characters who recognize their own weaknesses but can't seem to detach themselves from the thrill of power and the fun of being one of the beautiful people.

I had some difficulty remaining sympathetic toward the characters. Somewhere around the second chapter of the third novel, I was weary of them, and bored with their faux-apologetic drunken fumbling for each other's fleshy protuberances and dangling bits. It's a credit to Brammer that he created them so convincingly, and I'm grateful to have been reminded of why I stepped away from greater involvement in politics after my own experiences with people of this ilk in college.

Despite its age and it's fictional nature, The Gay Place is still the definitive book on Texas politics and Austin, and one of the top ten books on Texas overall. The charachiture of Lyndon Johnson is priceless.