Customer Reviews

Through It Came Bright Colors

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From the first sentence, I felt pulled in. Trebor Healey starts his book with a poetic metaphor, but rather than being flowery and sentimental, it's a hard-hitting, earthy, and, yes, romantic opening that made this reader feel that he was in extremely capable hands.

The end of that chapter is as beautiful and perfect as a poem. It hit me the way a poem does, like a revelation, as if the page caught fire and blew a veil off my eyes, and then burned a layer of insulation from around my heart.

This book makes me remember when I first came to San Francisco, when I was young and living on Skid Row. My experience was nothing like the experiences of Vince, or Neill, or Peter, but I believe those characters, and I like them. Hell, I love `em, to tell the truth. They got into my heart in about two minutes flat and are staying there quite comfortably. It's so easy to love all the people in `Through It Came Bright Colors,' because the writing comes from such a deep place.

Reading this book, I sigh, and ache, and love, and remember, and sigh again.

But oh Lord, the last chapter. The whole book cast a beatiful spell on me, all rough and sexy and pure, but that last chapter spun the whole thing into orbit. Brilliant and holy: my mouth was on the floor reading it, and my heart felt as if an ancient knot was being unfolded and loosened at last.

A few days ago, I wanted to start rereading it, having forgotten I had already given it to my best friend!

For those of you, like me, who are sick and tired of the cookie-cutter characters present in many gay coming-out first novels, "Through It Came Bright Colors" is a welcome breath of fresh air. The characters are unlike any others I've experienced in recent gay literature. They're human in every sense of the word: real, complex, imperfect, and, at times, unlikeable. They've stayed with me well after I've put the book down, which is the highest compliment I can give a writer. The other posters here have nicely summarized the novel, but let me just add that "Through It Came Bright Colors" is ultimately about going into the wilderness (both literally and figuratively) to find one's true self. That wilderness (be it cancer, a run-down boarding house, or a hike in the mountains)transforms each of the characters, as they journey to discover the truth about themselves.

In THROUGH IT CAME BRIGHT COLORS Trebor Healey creates believable, sympathetic characters (people any of us might meet in the urban landscape), then twists the plot elements just right
to keep the reader a bit off-balance, while handily avoiding the "gay novel" ghetto with a strong narrative thread involving the protagonist's brother's cancer and its effect on his family. Peter (the brother) and the parents may be less fully fleshed out than protagonist Neill and his love interest Vince, but that is how it should be. It is ultimately Neill's story - and a good one.
A favorite scene for me has Neill looking at SF and seeing the Sierra Nevada mountains. Healey leads us to the similarities between the two landscapes and, in doing so, highlights the vast difference. I love being in the Sierras so the section where Neill takes Vince up there was particularly enjoyable for me - and the unexpected direction it took was most effective. In the mid-70's I lived in a residence hotel in San Francisco and the experience was much as Healey describes life in Vince's home, the Baldwin Arms. Thus I find Healey's writing to be authentic when set against the standard of my own experience.
But it is Healey's use of language which sets this novel apart. His is clearly a poet's language and brings much pleasure simply on its own. Certain sections and individual lines jumped out at me and have lingered long after I put the book down. To cite just a few examples (without ruining any plot elements):
On page 53 he writes "Love was a much more physical thing than I'd ever understood it to be. It lived where his fingers touched mine; it's what made the water bead up on his shoulders and roll off; it's what made his skin warm, glowing and soft. I'd always thought love was some feeling in the mind, but this was the physicality of love: the love of the body, so much simpler; so much more useful." He is referring, in that passage, not to a lover, but to his brother's cancer-wracked and mutilated body. The feeling that passage planted within me was unexpected and profound.
I wish I'd written "the long bulb-studded strands of kelp unanchored and ambushed by flies"(p.77). I have seen that image on the beach so many times but never found the way to such a clear and accurate description. And on p.135: "Her eyes were like thick, clear glass when I reached her, as if her tears
had set up permanent residence atop her irises, refusing to recede of fall." This line not only describes a physical appearance, but uses that physicality to get deep into the being of the mother in a way that a more direct attempt to describe what she was feeling could never have done.
These are only a few of the many fine individual passages which work together to make this wonderful book something to treasure. It is hard to believe that this is a "first novel." I am eagerly awaiting his next one and hope that his poetry, especially a series of rare and increasingly hard to find chapbooks, is soon made more widely available.

This is not a love story. Nor do I think it was intended to be. It is, first and foremost, about the emotional growth of its narrator, Neill Cullane, a suburban youth confused about his sexuality and his role in his family. Although it might certainly, and rightfully, be viewed by the GLBT community as a "coming out" story, I think it is the latter theme, the exploration of family relationships, that ultimately distinguishes the book and makes it not only moving, but universal. Vince Malone, the charismatic, troubled street hood with whom Neill has his first sexual relationship, serves only as a vehicle through which Neill and the reader come to understand the intimate link between acceptance and love. Just as "Rain Man" is the story of Charlie Babbit, not his emotionally stunted brother Raymond, we know from the book's prophetic opening line that "Through it Came Bright Colors" is not a story of redemption for Vince. As with "Rain Man," the focus is on the character who has the ability to change and grow, Neill, and what his relationship with Vince teaches him about himself.

While Neill is exploring his burgeoning sexuality, his family appears, on the surface, to be coming unravelled. His "golden boy" younger brother Peter is undergoing a series of increasingly more disfiguring cancer surgeries and his parents are having difficulty coping. It is in the juxtaposition of the scenes of Neill's family (in present day and flashback) as they tentatively, awkwardly, knit together, with flashbacks to the nightmarish erosion of Vince's homelife that the book exhibits its major strength. Ultimately, Neill realises that the true pleasure of love is in the giving of it, not the receiving of it. When someone accepts your love, they also accept you. Individual scenes between Neill and each member of his family (including his macho older brother Paul, who, like Vince, pushes him away) tenderly, sometimes painfully, illustrate this.

At times the book has a bit of a cobbled together feel with some clumsy transitions between episodes in the Tenderloin with Vince, scenes of Neill's family life and the numerous flashbacks/reminiscences (with one particularly jarring shift of POV in a fairly short flashback sequence between Vince and a female psychologist that should have been either re-worked or expunged entirely). These things might easily have been remedied with the expansion of some sections (to smooth transitions) or perhaps by using a third person limited (as opposed to first person) narrative, but on the whole the book reads smoothly and coheres quite well. And these shortcomings are far outweighed by the carefully chosen language, rich with metaphor, and the overall emotional impact of story. I read this book several months ago and, I'll admit, the recent spate of reviews spurred me to contribute my opinion. All in all, I highly recommend this book.

The focus of Neill and his family is his younger brother's battle with cancer, so his own inner conflict about his sexual orientation is set aside. Accompanying his brother to the clinic, Neill meets another patient named Vince who draws Neill into a complicated and unsettling romance that he hides from his family. Neill falls deeper into Vince's dark and self-destructive life where he learns about courage, love, and truth, and ultimately finds the strength to tell his own truths to his family. Healey's poetic storytelling beautifully illuminates the romance, but stumbles elsewhere in the novel, creating an uneven path through the story. Overall this is a notable fiction debut from a writer whose burgeoning potential is only glimpsed here.

I read with this fellow at a bookstore in LA and listened to him from the front row, hanging on to his every word, as he tore through the first half of a piece called "Pancake Circus" from the new edition of BEST GAY EROTICA 2006. When time constraints forced Healey to break off from reading the story halfway through, the whole audience groaned as if in one breath, like one prevented from coming by, what, a discovery or an emergency. On the flight back home I started reading his novel THROUGH IT CAME BRIGHT COLORS about which I had heard quite a bit but from which, I confess, I had averted my eyes due to the extreme garishness of the cover, one of Harrington Park's specialties, throwing a rainbow glow over everything they touch like Willy Wonka or Sammy Davis Jr. Anyhow once I tore off its covers and tossed them towards the whirring propellors of the prop plane engines, where they went confetti like down the runway, the book was a delight. "Pancake Circus" has its own magic, but BRIGHT COLORS is a horse of a different, though equally estimable, what, well, color of course.

Healey has many gifts, and the book tells three stories, alternating back and forth between two of them like clockwork. In one story a boy of 21, Neill Culhane, finds the courage to come out to his family in a dreary suburb of San Francisco. In the second storyline he helps his younger brother Peter, who is trying to live with cancer and is always in and out of the hospital. In the third story, Neill finds himself the erotic prey of a dangerous youth, Vince Malone, one of the damaged boys who frequent the alleys where I live, South of Market here in San Francisco. Vince is trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with V and that stands for victim, for in far off and icy cold Buffalo New York, as a boy, little Vince was forced to have sex with his father in the shower and now he can barely stand to be touched, always keeping his T-shirt on even in bed with Neill. He split from his family at age 12 or 14 and hasn't looked back since, except every minute of every day when not nodding out that's what he is doing, looking back to the years of his abuse and blaming everything that's happened to him since on a pair of uncaring and abusive parents.

Neill's parents aren't so great either, but as Neill learns, it's better the devil you know. Healey gets all of it right, down to the details of the furnished flophouse room Vince hibernates in, with a triangulated sink in one corner, the green coverlet, the nosy yet oddly permissive desk clerk. Tourists from the theater district sometimes turn their noses up at the human refuse at their feet, and yet as Vince says they don't use San Francisco fully, none of us do, we only use ten percent of our brains and we only use 10 percent of San Francisco as well. Healey proceeds in metaphor, literally; that's the way he develops his story, in accretive segments of "this is like that," and it has a powerful, mesmerizing effect on the reader, for the borders of the novel are constantly shifting, permeable, like the "walls" of a tent in the desert. We feel rather than know why one story corresponds to another, how the cancer that is eating away at little Peter is contiguous to the "last year's rent" lifestyle Vince glories in.

While the book has these three stories, it doesn't ever really come up with a plot per se, but I for one would forgo a plot's claptrap in order to experience Trebor Healey's experiments, the leaky hiss of loss.

Trebor Healey's first novel affirms today's headlines: the suburbs make people sick. In following the story of a suburbanite aching to come out loving another young man, Healey uses the unlikely metaphor of illness as teacher. It's an absorbing read of real characters, contemporary issues, and writing that regularly shimmers. This is the kind of first novel that leaves you anticipating what will follow.

Neil, his college drop-out protagonist, faces an illness more serious than even 'burb-induced obesity and depression. Though the latter secretly haunts him, it is the cancer diagnosis of his athlete younger brother that forces Neil to become anchor to a family drifting under the siege of a stricken adolescent. To cope with the smothering role of caregiver, Neil escapes his Northern California bedroom community for the Skid Row bedroom of Vince, a compelling, righteous survivor of both child abuse and a cancer battle of his own. With his alluring looks and "What Would Satan Do?" T-shirt, Vince helps Neil break down his inhibitions and express love. Problem is, Vince just can't accept it, let alone return it.

Here's an oversimplification of the plot: Boy meets boy meets heroin. That's where the strength of this writing is at its best, for while cancer has a known cause and, in theory at least, a cure, serious drug addictions remain unfathomable and usually hopeless. Healey deftly portrays Neil's suburban naivete: that his abundant good will can stabilize Vince just as it stabilizes his stricken brother and suffering parents. The hard lesson is that his most powerful refrain, "That's what cancer taught me," is no match for the diagnosis of addiction.

In fresh language, Healey shows how young people have to find their own way in the wilderness of love, especially gay love. His tour of the suburbs, though sketchy, is all that's necessary: the vague, dutiful parents, the formulaic schools, and the underlying dysfunction of the world of tract houses. His portrait of Neil as the good-humored closet case, second best even as an older brother, is so accurate it's painful to read. Descriptions of tumor recurrence, skin grafts, and night nurses will have a queasy familiarity to anyone who's stayed by a sickbed.

Healey's writing comes even more alive in following his characters into San Francisco's gritty street life, and, briefly into the Sierras for a backpacking trip. His depth of detail makes each environment solid; perfect stages for his characters. There's something unusual about Healey's ability to retain and express the complexities of adolescent emotional development, especially through a gay lens. Even at their most authentically tortured, there's a clarity to the feelings this author conveys. Best of all, it's not for homos only; Through It Came Bright Colors should have a strong following among anyone who likes good, substantial writing.

This book is tailor made for adolescent readers. Its honest and detailed affirmation of their tender and torrential emotions, as expressed by Neil and Vince, is rare to find in contemporary literature. Pity that in the age of Ashcroft, the salty language that helps make it so real might also keep it off the shelves of every high school library, where it would do a world of good. But that's merely a side observation. Healey's written a novel that's as profound in its substance as in the quality of its prose. For all of its raw heartbreak, I wanted to stay in that world for at least another hundred pages.

While the last reviewer said that all the reviews have been written by friends of Trebor, I will be honest. I met Trebor...once. But only after I read his book, I wrote him and was compelled to meet him. I liked the novel, no one said it was going to reinvent gay fiction, it's not trying to, it's just telling a story and that's all that really matters in the end. Trebor had the guts to tell his story, some of which is based on his life, in a very real and honest way. As I told Trebor, the story wouldn't have worked without either factor. If the family part was not there, the story would have been about a messed up relationship. If the relationship part was not there, it would have just been a story about a guy dealing with family tragedy (his brother's cancer)and trying to come out to his family. Together they created a perfect synergy of what it is like to be a gay man living two lives, trying to fulfill familial obligations while looking for an escape in someone who is dangerous enough to garner his attention while also being someone who cannot realistically build a future with because they are so self destructive and intent on ripping apart anything good that comes to them. Vince is a screwed up person who dealt with a very nasty childhood. The narrator is fairly innocent, he lived in the suburban dream, so it was only natural that he would be attracted to someone who was completely and utterly different from himself. The motivation of the character is believable. The parts with his brother are not overly sentimental or "Hallmark" in the least. I am looking forward to Trebor's next novel and hopefully getting together with him for coffee again someday ;).

A lovely, engrossing character study. Healey's prose is luminous, and glowing with original metaphors and evocative descriptions. I would encourage anyone who is considering purchasing this book to do so. It's a touching, award-winning work of fiction you will really enjoy for its heart-rending, genuine truth. Healey is a true talent.

Through It Came Bright Colors is truly a page-turner. Healey builds his characters and brings them to life so carefully and with such artistic prose, you feel like the characters are people you have come to know in your own life. A thought-provoking novel, Healey's story really portrays how familial love and romantic love can be so different yet so intertwined by who we are and how we open ourselves up to new people we encounter in our lives. A key theme in Healey's book is that we need to learn the value that trust can bring into our lives - the courage it gives us, the strength it gives us, the fortitude it gives us to continue to face new challenges. This book will relate to everyone - parents, siblings, young adults and older adults. I laughed a lot, I cried (and sobbed here and there) - I experienced this book cover to cover.

Healey has shown us with his poetic prose how each of his characters becomes who they are, and how important it is to explore what drives us in our lives. After all, that's really what enables us to grow and learn how to love.