Customer Reviews

Onyx

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

 

 

Felice Picano's work ranges so differently from book to book, so I was curious to see why he said in a reading event that it was "a difficult book" for him to write. While AIDS novels may have become passe, this one isn't just that, but covers the ground of painful hospital scenes, and how it and other tragedies disintegrate a happy extended family. While the mother-in-law character embodies all that is evil in homophobia, and some may consider her a stereotype, I found her all too realistic for the era. The love affair between Ray and studly "straight" Mike is both erotic and touching, capturing the embodiment of the type of men that fill New York and cause quite a distraction for gay guys. Picano dispenses with some of the cleverness of his earlier work, and has written a touching saga of love and loss. It's also a bit of a love note to New York, and perhaps a reflection of his own move from NYC to Los Angeles. With all the music references (the narrator Ray runs a classical music publishing company), it's too bad there isn't an accompanying soundtrack!

Onyx was my first encounter with the work of Felice Picano. I can't say that I am totally displeased with what I found.

Picano's use of lanugage is astonishing, beautiful and most of the time, flows like poetry. Unfortunately, the story that is told is uneven and loses focus.

It is extraordinarily difficult to tell a story from different perspectives and keep a reader's interest. This seemed to be major error for Onyx.

Overall, the book would have been much stronger had it kept its lens focused on Ray, who is a likeably flawed character. His journey through the various manifestations of love rings true, but the story tended to veer away from this course too often, as if the author was afraid of what he might find.

While the story of Jesse, Rays lover who is fading from life, is told with compassion and grace, it would have served a much better purpose in a separate work.

I admire Picano's effort with this book and will definitely read his past writing, but I wish I would have started with his earlier work, which I am told is much stronger.

ONYX is an amazingly fine novel from a writer who seems to grow with each published work. Though many may overlook this latest book as merely another Violet Quill opus chronicling gay life, this book is more than a solid story, more than a beautifully written novel, more than many other books in this genre. This novel is an elegantly written exploration of the quest of the individual in the 21st Century - the immediacy and inexplicable choices that death makes, how individuals deal with genetic agar plates peppered by the vagaries of childhood environments/family history/social mores/chance encounters, why we become puppets of our stage play of id/ego/superego. Picano has created thoroughly 3-dimensional characters who leap off the page as both good and bad acquaintances we've all encountered. There seems to be much autobiographical material here: how else could the author know the complexities of his characters unless he'd lived in their skins of mixed in ther minds!

ONYX, the title, refers to a life long thwarted desire for an unobtainable object (an onyx ring) that becomes available only after Charon guides the main character across the river Styx. Love, relationships, family, finding physical solace in a surrogate sexual fling, the vileness of AIDS and the accompanying tragedies encountered at the demise of a loved one whose family has never accepted the life of the victim, the true meaning of friendship, the equal vileness of cancer, of vehicular deaths, of family hate gone wild - all are components of this book. There are surprising elements that inform us of practices unknown to most of us (were you aware that you could watch a cremation with all its gothic elements?), as well as pages of simply lyrical prose becoming poetry. Picano knows how to create atmosphere, how to lead us through the complexities of nature's erratic moves, and most of all he knows how to keep our attention focused in reading a book that becomes addictive.

For those who have not had the pleasure of reading Picano, jump in and ready yourself for a ride you'll not forget. From another artistic viewpoint this book design, cover, printing choices, page layout are the work of an extraordinary craftsman. This reader finds ONYX to be his finest novel to date.....and waiting for what is next!

"Will gay writers continue writing about AIDS," someone asked Felice Picano after his brilliant "Excavating the Self in Your Writing" lecture at the Lambda Writers Festival last October. He had just spoken on memoir writing, and the core reference was his own latest novel, Onyx, about the horrors of his lover's last months of suffering and unspeakable hospital ordeal. With this novel Picano adds his voice to other memoirs of the plague-a canon including Edmund White's The Married Man, Paul Monette's Borrowed Time, Fenton Johnson's The Geography of the Heart, and my personal favorite, Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest.

Onyx may be admired from many perspectives. Few writers can approach Picano's craft. He can make a line sing. He can tug at the heart, the head, or the haunches with lyricism, humor, and lusty eroticism. His writing is deeply human, the conflicts are complex, and his stories move along and are emotionally moving. Yet I finished Onyx less disturbed, less shaken than I was prepared to be. How is it that the author of exhilarating classics like The Lure and Like People in History could write his own most personal tragedy, the loss of his life partner and soul mate, and I not be moved to tears?

The story opens with morning light through vertical blinds and ends with evening light through an airplane's window as Ray flies to the West Coast to start over after the deaths of his lover in a New York hospital and his teenage nephew, struck by a car as he runs to find his uncle. In between, Ray cares for Jesse through every crisis, and Jesse magnanimously encourages Ray to find a sexual partner since Jesse's failing health has cost them that intimacy. Ray meets a hunky, straight, blue-collar, married guy and easily seduces him-a variation on the Cowboy and the Dandy, the naive but more-than-willing-to-learn, curious-if-not-questioning innocent and the worldly sophisticate. Ray teaches Mike things he did not know, and Mike keeps coming back for more instruction. The relationship never goes beyond sex for either man.

Ray even tells Jesse what's going on, proof that mere sex cannot sully their perfect marriage. There's also a handsome plumber and a French film producer Ray attracts with innuendo and his big libido. Domestic duties, sex, career moves, and the high drama of Jesse's dying make the story lines. Nowhere has the horror of AIDS been more graphically described. Even the elaborate description of Jesse's cremation is anticlimactic to the suffering Ray saw Jesse endure.

To avoid unmitigated gloom and doom, Picano mates Ray and Mike in frequent sex scenes-like comic relief in heavy drama. The scenes sizzle, but they ill-serve, I think, the undying love the novel is about. And other problems undermine Onyx. Adele, Jesse's southern mom, is so malevolent that she's a stick-figure harridan, the stereotypical mother-in-law from Hell; a caricature without a single redeeming trait. Sometimes, too, the writing takes over the story, as in displays of musicological esoterica, and becomes its own end. The original hardback edition also contains an excessive number of textual errors, including words out of order, phrases repeated, and careless typos.

In his October lecture, Picano said that enough time must pass between events and writers' memories of them in order to make the creative transformation into fiction-time to move from uncontrolled feelings to controlled objectivity. Onyx needed a longer gestation than its ten years. I wanted to love this book. Instead, I liked it. What might have been a five-star novel by an all-star writer is only a very good three-star one.

This is a moving, heartfelt, skillfully written book, with AIDS as one of many themes. But this is not an "AIDS book." It is a book about love, loss, passion, and what drives us in life. What are our motivations? What is most important in life? There are passages in this book that are so beautifully written that my entire body was covered with chills; I felt emotionally drained and vibrantly alive at the same time. This is what the best art does--solicits both a physical and mental reaction. ONYX, certainly, does this; it's one of Picano's best books to date.

I have yet to write a review for a book that I didn't enjoy and sadly this will be my first! I was astonished to find Picano -- a literary genius from his early days as an integral part of the Violet Quill -- to the consumate favourite he has become among his legion of gay fans, was behind this book! Granted, his characters were multi-dimensional as is to be expected, but some of the storylines seemed to veer quite literally off the page for me at least! It was expected that this was a novel about love and loss, coping and looking inside of oneself, and for the most part this is what he gives the reader. My complaint? The too-familiarly-rendered mother in law and the total disintegration of the central storyline once the central plotlines have reached their fulfilment. Why introduce a young character like Chris who to me seemed ripe for exploration in another instalment, only to have him disposed of in a manner and storyline that lost all credibility? And the mentioning of the neice with cancer... it was like he was writing for a really bad soap at the same time and accidentally got the pages mixed together. This is not one of his better pieces and I only hope that in the future that he remembers why he has such a loyal following: we love his characters

Felice Picano is considered to be one of gay literature's greatest assetts. I go back and forth on that judgement, mainly because his last book, Book of Lies, was so awful! It read like a tossed out script from some Aaron Spelling melodrama!

But with Onyx, you will find Picano in truly great form. The novel is crisp story telling that gets to th heart of its characters. Of love about to be lost (yes, AIDS) and the journey to go on with one's life in the face of adversity.

There are many surprise turns hear that one will read and find yourself screaming in shock. They all work. There is nothing that is contrived about this story.

While some of the "love" scenes may be something you feel you have resd before, the novel goes further to get to the heart of its characters. It doesn't just give you names to remember, but people to identify with and love or cherish them as you see fit.

There was a time when I enjoyed Picano's novels. I remember liking THE LURE a great deal and recommending it to all my friends. I certainly thought LIKE PEOPLE IN HISTORY was well worth the read. I do not know what went wrong with ONYX. I read that Mr. Picano lost a lover to AIDS. Any gay male in any major city in the United States in the last 20 years who is fortunate enough to be alive certainly understands the writer's loss. That, however, is no excuse for this book. Mr. Picano should have written another AIDS memoir or worked harder on this novel. The characters are basically black and white. I had difficulty believing they were real. For example, Ray, an Adonis, in the most graphic of scenes, has sex with the "straight" blue-collar worker Mike, who is also an Adonis, over and over, then rushes to give a blow by blow description of his adventures to his dying lover Jesse, who is without jealousy, can't wait to hear such stories and encourages Ray, who feels no guilt. Mike and Ray do not practice "safer" sex either. Certainly we have all known too many parents of AIDS patients who are awful people; but Jesse's mother, Adele Vaughan Moody, nee Carstairs-- if one can belive that name--is totally bad, a complete caricature. The basest characters must have some glimmer of goodness if they are to be believed at all. Finally the awful hospital scenes were so graphic as to be unreadable. I think Mr. Picano achieved a first in his minute description of how a body is burned in a crematory. Surely the Greeks, who were right about so many things, were absolutely correct when they had some things happen off stage.

Many fine books about AIDS, both memoirs and novels, have been written in the past two decades. Monette's BORROWED TIME: AN AIDS MEMOIR, Mark Doty's HEAVEN'S COAST, the wonderful HOLDING THE MAN by the Australian writer Timothy Conigrave, Allen Gurganus' PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS, Edumnd White's THE MARRIED MAN, come to mind. Sadly this novel does not make the list.

Reading this novel was not a total waste, however. I think I'll rent some of the Astaire/Rogers movies one of Picano's characters keeps watching to entertain himself. I kept wishing I were watching the graceful Astaire and Rogers instead of plowing through this novel.

There was a time when I enjoyed Picano's novels. I remember liking THE LURE a great deal and recommending it to all my friends. I certainly thought LIKE PEOPLE IN HISTORY was well worth the read. I do not know what went wrong with ONYX. I read that Mr. Picano lost a lover to AIDS. Any gay male in any major city in the United States in the last 20 years and is fortunate enough to be alive certainly understands the writer's loss. That, however, is no excuse for this book. Mr. Picano should have written another AIDS memoir or worked harder on this novel. The characters are basically black and white. I had difficulty believing they were real. Ray, an Adonis, in the most graphic of scenes, has sex with the "straight" blue-collar worker Mike, who is also an Adonis, over and over, then rushes to give a blow by blow description of his adventures to his dying lover Jesse, who can't wait to hear such stories and encourages Ray. Mike and Ray do not practice "safer" sex either. Certainly we have all known too many parents of AIDS patients who are awful people; but Adele Vaughan Moody, nee Carstairs-- do you belive that name--is a total caricature. The basest characters have some glimmer of
goodness if they are to be believed at all. Finally the awful hospital scenes were so graphic as to be unreadable. I think Mr. Picano achieved a first in his minute description of how a body is burned in a crematory. Surely the Greeks who were right about so many things were absolutely on target when they had some things happen off stage.

Many fine AIDS books, both memoirs and novels, have been written in the past two decades...Sadly this one does not fall in that category. It's far too much, far too late.

While this is a more satsifying work than the dreadful "Book Of Lies", what puzzles me most is why the author set the story in the early 90's in the first place? Because of that, the story lacks the emotional impact it might have had if it had been written at that time. I've read it before, I've seen it before ("Longtime Companion", for example)...I've lived it! Since then, something called combination therapies have exploded on the scene, drastically reducing the number of AIDS deaths. I keep wondering what a different spin the story would have taken if he had set it just as protease inhibitors were being introduced.. and the impact it had on the couple once readying for death now being given a chance to prolong their life together.