Customer Reviews

The Silicon Valley Diet

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The conversations between the characters here range from hilarious to absurd. Lovers, ex-lovers and friends all seem extremely sharp, knowing and a bit too smart for their own goods. A lot of the characters here seem isolated from the gay mainstream and while the critique of gay life is low-key, it's also pointed. Some of the reveries about friends and acquaintances who've died of AIDS verge on the sentimental. What I like most is how Grayson ties together all kinds of things you ordinarily wouldn't expect, just as his unlikely lovers manage to stay together, at least temporarily. I'm surprised the tone of the book remained consistent throughout the stories, and I wonder how many of them are autobiographical (I bet a lot!)

The dozen or so stories in this book add up to more than just their sum. It's a look at American society, not just gay culture, but also the technological changes and how they effect people. The author seems to understand how computers have both made some aspects of life easier -- i.e., gay teens can meet others online, the web can help you find people (lovers) you lost touch with == and some things just more wierd and confushing. Plus the characters comment in a witty way and there aren't any stereotypes of people, only individual characters who seem real.

Although some of the stories are kind of experimental and use techniques I think they don't really need, I think this is a wonderful collection of stories about gay relationships and cultural identity. Grayson's couples are usually interracial or intercultural -- black/white, white/Asian, Asian/Hispanic, Jewish/Indian, punk/cowboy -- and their conflicts are played for witty comedy and clever dialogue. There's also a very poignant strain in memories of experiences of loss, including those friends who've died of AIDS. The author seems to be trying to use gay relationships as a way of dealing with our current obsessions: the Internet, wealth, ethnic identity, and pop culture -- not to mention dieting (a lot about food in this book, including ethnic stuff). The best story is "Boys Club," a hilarious look at the gay punk subculture.

OK, so Grayson isn't David Foster Wallace, David Sedaris or Dave Eggers, but he's a minor league version of all three of those incredible writers, and his rambling, funny, self-conscious stories about gay relationships -- particularly between guys of different races & ethnicities -- are worth your time. Grayson seems to enjoy describing the endless ways people can be nice to each other. What conflict there is in the book is usually internal and external conflicts are resolved with humor and kindness. If you're looking for plot or traditional fiction, you'll hate this book. But if you like digressions, riffs on contemporary culture and the Internet, and puns, you'll enjoy "The Silicon Valley Diet."

This book won't appeal to people who like stories that have beginnings, middles and ends, more or less in that order. At first the author's narrative techniques are hard to get used to, but it's worth it in the end because he always seems to tie up the details of seemingly unrelated threads in the story. Some of the stories are more like prose poems, using sections with the titles of Web browser screen commands, different kinds of legal actions, recipes for cooking Spanish potatoes or titles of terrible 1970s songs like "Billy don't Be A Hero" & "The Night Chicago Died." The book is oddly effective when it goes into memories of the characters and their experiences. The best story is "Mysteries of Ranch Management," which isn't as good as Annie Proulx's tales of gay Wyoming cowboys but which has more humor and a lot of facts about something called leafy splurge.

Gay readers will enjoy the tender, jokey and affectionately messed-up relationships in these stories. Not much plot here, more slices of life dealing with stuff like gay cowboys in Wyoming post-Matthew Sheppard, dot-com geniuses searching for romance as well as big money, gay immigrants struggling to deal with the freedom America gives them, and a terrific series of stories about an interracial couple who keep breaking up in hilarious (and ridiculous) arguments about TV shows, politics, and Catholic dogma (a fight about what the Immaculate Conception is leads them to a wrestling match and a bondage scene). Here's the narrator of the title story in a typical commentary on hunting for love: "I'd long ago given up going to slaughterhouses and trying to approach aspiring Abercrombie & Fitch catalog models emitting radiation from isotopes of unobtanium. After enough 'access denied' messages, you don't want to do anything but log off." Berserk but true.

The author's weird sense of humor and roundabout way of tellinga story, with lots of asides and non sequiturs, reminded me of DaveEggers or David Forster Wallace. The characters here have no boring coming-out problems (except maybe the cowboy in Wyoming, but who can blame him) or typical gay situations. You get the feeling they care more about witty conversation than sex, but the humor doesn't seem very gay. It's kind of a bizarre take on gay relationships, often online ones, and the book drags in spots. But then you get these incredible riffs that really sparkle, particularly in the title story. "The Silicon Valley Diet" knocked me out when I first read it ... and it holds up great on the second reading.

The gay characters in this book are decidedly odd. Take Elihu and Kevin in Grayson's story "Salugi at Starbucks." They are fortyish Jewish-Americans from Brooklyn who e-mail each other. The narrative is told in alternating e-mail messages from Elihu, still in Brooklyn, only recently out to his parents, and first-person remembrances of Kevin, who's known Elihu ever since high school. Both are loners who seem unable to sustain committed relationships. Kevin is a perpetual graduate student who wanders from campus to campus while Elihu abandoned a college teaching career for relatively unimportant jobs on Wall Street.
Ostensibly, Kevin and Elihu tell the story of Elihu's meeting with Bud, a chef, on a trip to New Orleans and his preparations for Bud's moving into his Brooklyn Heights co-op. It eventually becomes clear, first to Kevin, and ultimately to Elihu, that Bud has been lying about moving to New York (and perhaps about everything in his life, from his job at Antoine's restaurant to his kid brother with AIDS in Austin). Kevin goes along with his friend's fantasy of preparing for Bud's arrival even as they both know deep down that the situation is merely a way for Elihu to combat the loneliness and emptiness in his life. When Kevin does meet Elihu at a Manhattan Starbucks after Elihu has learned he's been taken for a sucker (no pun intended), Kevin can't understand why Elihu isn't angry. Elihu replies that he's not angry because he's at least managed to occupy himself for months and besides, "I've got an interesting story to tell people."
Other stories in The Silicon Valley Diet feature relationships of white guys with Asian, black, or Latino would-be boyfriends. In three stories - "Spaghetti Language," "The Five Stages of Eating at Cuban-Chinese Restaurants," and "Those Old, Dark Sweet Songs," the narrator describes his affair with Terence, a young, somewhat flaky African American.
But Terence does not seem to be the same character in each of the stories. In "Spaghetti Language," he works in the men's clothing department at an Atlanta store who frowns when he sees a display of outfits, not because he doesn't like the clothes but because "I don't like the way they're lit." In "Cuban-Chinese Restaurants," Terence is still a Southerner, but the couple are in New York, having a series of breakups, never connecting in their sometimes hilarious non sequitur conversations. While the Cuban-Chinese restaurants they frequent may feature an easy mix of two disparate cuisines, it is clear that the unnamed narrator and Terence can't get past their different ways of looking at the world. The narrator tries to get Terence to see that his beloved nephew is not really his twin brother's son, that the baby is totally white, Terence - like Elihu in "Starbucks" - prefers his fantasy to harsh reality.
In "Songs," Terence is still the narrator's lover, still black, but he's a successful fashion designer; although their sex life ("light bondage") is great, a worldwide shortage of chocolate is the impetus for their impending breakup as the narrator compares his parents' lifelong love affair unfavorably with his inability to connect with Terence, who is obsessed with making money.
"Mysteries of Ranch Management," set in Wyoming soon after the Matthew Shepard murder, begins with the deliberatively provocative statement, "He never should have gotten into that truck with them," from Betty, the wheelchair-bound best friend of the narrator and sister of his closeted cowboy lover, Brant. The implication is that in a harsh homophobic culture, sensible gay men come out at their own peril, is disturbing, but the narrator and Brant settle for a low-key, easy-going secret relationship even though, as it is gingerly put, they are "sexually incompatible." If it's not even half a loaf, Grayson's narrator says, it's better to have "a slice of goddamn bread," especially in a place like Wyoming.
In the long title story, the narrator is another computer whiz kid who attempts to Americanize a recent Vietnamese immigrant he's met through a personals ad. His best friend and ex-boyfriend Andy Ishigura, an assimilated Japanese-American, who warns Justin that he is condescending to Duc when he suggests Duc change his name to Doug. Grayson's take on multiculturalism is never more interesting than in this story, which examines not only another failed gay relationship in which friendship ("buds") prevails over passion, but what it means to be an American in a society where Duc's Vietnamese little nephew comes home speaking Spanish because all the other kids at his day care center are Mexican. Set in a Silicon Valley where dot-com start-ups are still booming, the story nevertheless points out that not everyone in San Jose and San Francisco - particularly the Mexican and Vietnamese communities - are reaping the benefits of "the greatest legal concentration of wealth in the history of our planet."

As in Shakespearean comedies, everyone is paired up at the end - Duc with another Vietnamese guy, Andy with the "flatliner" Mauricio ("what he lacks in bandwidth he makes up in inches," Andy remarks), and Justin with the half-Jewish, half-Asian Indian Jay, whose entire knowledge of his South Asian heritage "comes from reading the Kama Sutra and watching the movie Gandhi" - but these pairs are more or less imperfect, and by implication, doomed. "The Silicon Valley Diet" is not just the book Justin is writing - the diet is so ridiculously strict only an obsessive-compulsive could follow it - it hints at the limits of relationships in a digitalized world.
Grayson is a social critic disguised as a fiction writer, and that's presented in all of his stories, whether the tale of a memorial service for a childhood friend who died of AIDS ("Willie 95") or the gay punk rock scene ("Boys Club") or a graduate student's relationship with two gay activists, Javier and Bryan) in the course of an anti-gay referendum in a college town ("Moon Over Moldova"). Grayson has an expansive, funny, and heartbreaking view of this planet and the gay men and women who inhabit it.

The stories in this volume show how difficult it is to be gay -- that is, to be a human being. The characters are basically all the same person: a bright, loquacious, ironic Aerican gay male who may be white or black, Asian or Hispanic, 22 or 42, who deals with society, family, and the culture of the mass media with humor, compassion, and a touch of self-pity. I liked the story about the gay punk rock band the best, but the story of the closeted gay cowboy ranch manager was also very affecting, especially in light of the fact that it takes place in Wyoming after Matthew Shepard's murder. The author seems to like women and old people, too -- or his characters do. A nice, pleasant read. I laughed aloud a few times, and it usually takes a lot to get me to do that.

This was a compelling and funny book. I like the way the author has a sense of humor about his (or his characters) relationships. There's a lot of rambling, so if you like plot as the main thing in a short story, this probably wouldn't be to your taste. But the dialogue is brilliant and sometimes hysterically funny. I give it five stars.