Lost Language of Cranes, The [Paperback]

David Leavitt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1987

A remarkable first novel about a complex family and a marriage suddenly imperiled by the revelation of long-kept secrets; a son's discovery of his own homosexuality, a father's longing to be able to live like his son, and a mother's despair.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This first novel by the author of Family Dancing, a well-received collection of short stories ( LJ 8/84), reflects both the author's youth and his promise. The story focuses on Philip Benjamin, a 25-year-old New Yorker, somewhat naive but definitely gay, who is involved in his first "serious" romance. This situation is complicated by the struggle of Philip's father to deal more openly with his own longstanding, but thus far closeted, homosexual inclinations. With Philip's coming out, father is thrown into even greater turmoil, mother begins to realize the complete truth, and all are forced to reexamine the ties that bind them. Leavitt again proves adept at looking into the complexities of familial relationships and generational differences. At times the work seems self-indulgent and just a bit trite but is nonetheless recommended. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Fascinating ... lingers in the mind." (The New York Times Review of Books ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; Bantam Windstone Trade Ed., Nov.1987 edition (October 1, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 055334465X
• ISBN-13: 978-0553344653
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,281,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SUPERB, May 9, 2000

By 

R. Penola (NYC, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Language of Cranes (Paperback)

A wonderful, literary, entertaining and realistic book about the deceptions, heartaches, joys and secrets engendered in a family where homosexuality exists. Though this book is already nearly 10 years old (or older?) it still feels contemporary, and I think that is because the relationships smack of the truth. I simply love the novel's poetic metaphor, that of the lost language of the cranes. For that reason alone it is worth taking the emotional journey of reading Leavitt's first, and I think best, novel.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Brave New Author, March 24, 2010

By 

benshlomo "benshlomo" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel (Paperback)

Perhaps I shouldn't review this book. "The Lost Language of Cranes" is both a work of fiction and an important document in the history of gay life and literature - its concerns don't touch my life directly. Some in the gay community might love it for its topic alone, and resent any straight person's criticism. But I'm going to review it anyway.

Pretty simple stuff, really. It's about Owen and Rose Benjamin and their adult son Philip, a typical New York family except that Philip is gay and hasn't told his parents yet. Turns out Owen is also gay and hasn't told his wife - she thinks he might have a mistress squirreled away, and doesn't seem to mind too much. (Actually, he satisfies his urges at a gay porn theater.) In any case, Rose knows that something is up, and occasionally takes a lover herself. All of this is obviously unstable, and when Philip finally comes out, things have to change.

I'm sure that a lot of gay people rejoiced when this novel hit the shelves in the mid-1980s, a time when (according to author David Leavitt) there wasn't much gay fiction to be had other than pornography or low-quality pulp romances. African-Americans probably felt the same about "The Invisible Man", and Jews about "Goodbye, Columbus". Here's a group that's had little or no presence in literature, and suddenly there's a book or books about their lives. It proves that your presence is worth looking at and writing about. I'm therefore sorry to say that from a strictly literary standpoint, "Lost Language of Cranes" is mediocre.

Not godawful, mind you - far from it. I give David Leavitt major points for prioritizing his characters over his plot points, as I would be grateful to any author for doing that. Surely there weren't many novels before 1986 in which a young person comes out to his or her parents, but there were more than enough novels of similar familial confrontation to make the plotline a cliché. In the hands of an unskilled author, you'd get the confrontation, the pain and tears, the period of separation, and finally the joyful reunion and forgiveness all around. Yawn. That's not how life works, and David Leavitt was too good even in his twenties to succumb to that cheap of a structure. Owen, Rose and Philip deal with each other in all the loving, clumsy, wounded and uncertain ways that a real family might, and "Lost Language" is a valuable work for that reason alone. The characters are pretty good - it's in the language and narration that this novel falls short.

Leavitt's images of New York City can be intriguing. You get the sense from time to time that there's something hidden behind the skyline, which fits in well with his characters' attempts to keep secrets. He's also good at showing how a gay person might find certain sorts of images (including pornography) liberating, which helps make his characters deeply sympathetic. His dialogue, on the other hand, clops along most of the time - if a character has anything to say that takes up more than a sentence or two, that person frequently resorts to abstractions and sounds like a political pamphlet. Which may be realistic - some people do make speeches in everyday discourse - but it doesn't read very well.

The author provides detailed backstories for pretty nearly everyone in his novel, which isn't necessary and slows the narrative way down. As a rule, supporting characters are just that, designed to support the main action. Tell everything about all of them and it can be hard to follow the principal plot or even determine what it is, especially in a midlength work like this. Dickens sometimes provided excessive background information on his minor characters, but his works were five or six hundred pages long - everyone had room to stretch out.

And here's something odd - despite the presence of one black character, Leavitt's New York City strikes one as surprisingly homogenous. Almost all the characters in "Lost Language" have middle-class jobs and backgrounds - they're all editors or educators or creative types of one kind or another, and almost all of them are white. Even his black character is a Ph.D. candidate and the adopted daughter of an upper-middle-class black couple. The last time I ran across such a pale, well-off, intellectual NYC, it was in a Woody Allen movie, and even he couldn't get away with it for long.

Now, like any author, Leavitt is entitled to create whatever setting pleases him. My point is that this one doesn't serve his story. He's trying to be realistic about the emerging gay world, and his city is the stuff of fantasy. And for goodness's sake, everyone's so well-behaved, in the porn theaters and everywhere else. For a tale this emotionally charged, I would have expected at least one genuine outburst, but even the most tortured characters remain so sedate I can't quite believe their pain.

Maybe the saddest thing is the way this novel handles its central image, the lost language of the title. One of the novel's characters runs across the story of a baby, frequently left alone by his drug-addicted mother, who saw a construction site through his window and took to imitating the big cranes. This probably has something to do with gay people trying to find a satisfying way to express themselves, but Leavitt doesn't integrate it into the story, so it remains an intriguing image that could just as easily have been left out. Too bad - in some ways it's the most inventive thing in the novel.

In short, "Lost Language of Cranes" has some serious flaws. What makes it worth reading is the energy behind it. The novel is the first lengthy piece by a young author who had the courage to tackle something close to his heart, and the courage shows. So, not a classic, but a good early step.

Benshlomo says, Go, young man, go.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful. Timeless. A gay classic to be reckoned with., August 7, 2000

By 

Anon - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Language of Cranes (Paperback)

When I am given the task of writing a review such a wonderful book, I have to wonder where to start. Leavitt's writing is fresh, beautiful, and goes down so smooth you don't realize you have the pages turning until you stop and look to see how much you've read. The breadth and accuracy of emotions portrayed in this book are truly extrodinary. This is truly a beautiful story that will stay with me in my heart. My heart goes out to Rose, who has to contend with so much and wonder if she gives off pheromones that turn men gay. My sympathies find their way to Owen who struggles with an issue his whole life, and only finds that he took it the wrong direction and wasted it and hurt someone that he love--but not in the way he might have originally thought he would. And I send a whole spectrum of my emotions to Philip whoes personality and feelings in many ways reflect my own; Philip's strugle is the most completely documented. The novel comes to a closing in which the reader is left to speculate where things will go from there, and I have to complain, but the complaint is mostly because by that point I never wanted the novel to end. While Edmund White proves to be the best gay writer of his generation, David Leavitt takes the tourch and makes it burn even brighter. And for that he is to be celbrated.

This was the first Leavitt novel I read, and I followed it up with his wondeful collection, Family Dancing. I am now reading Arkansas: Three Novellas. Prejudice hurts us, but the mainstream suffers more than they know for not finding and embracing a book of such beauty.