Customer Reviews

Virginia Lovers

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

 

 

Michael Parker has always written lyrically and poetically. But in this novel his storytelling acumen and talent have risen to equal heights with his talent for imagery and character description. I loved this book! This is not a "Southern novel"; this is a story of family, tragedy and redemption, passages and human character, which happens to be set in a small town in the south. This novel should appeal to anyone who loves a good story but also understands the importance of family and the roles we play in family. Read this book!

Author Michael Parker certainly knows teenage angst. He also knows about small town America and how teenagers who are somehow different can so often be cruelly ostracized and made to feel like outcasts. In his world, young men are often angst-ridden, and troubled, stumbling through life shouldering enormous problems with no resolution in sight. Even the families depicted in his novels go through their days in a miasma of missed communication.

In his latest, Virginia Lovers, it is 1975 and the Edgecombe family is living in Trent, North Carolina. They're just trying to get along and survive each day without arguing. Over the years, brothers Pete and Daniel have steadily grown apart. Now more like acquaintances than actual brothers, Pete has developed a set of unruly, disruptive buddies and spends his time drinking with them, rolling joints, being cool, and fantasizing about the Rolling Stones. He's a smart, brilliant boy, but Thomas, his concerned father, is beginning to worry, not just about the people he's hanging out with - "the riffraff demimonde," but also about his recent derelict behaviour.

Daniel, on the other hand, is a star student and had been working hard in the hope of obtaining the prestigious Carmichael Scholarship that will finally get him out of this tin pot, hick town. Neither concerned nor particularly interested in what his younger brother says or does, Daniel throws himself into his studies with an intellectual rigor and tries hard to be a valued member of the school football team, even though he's only playing because it will make him look better in the eyes of the Carmichael judges.

Thomas, their morally upright father, runs Trent's local newspaper. A left of center journalist, and a closeted champion of civil rights, Thomas has spent most of his professional life dedicated to presenting honest, non-partisan news, but he constantly has to battle the more conservative forces who in the past have been more easily offended by his more liberal views. His role as "a purveyor of truth in the community" and unapologetic defense of the blacks and Jews has often comes at a price in the form of cancelled subscriptions and angry letters. Thomas seeks solace from Caroline, allowing her "shoulder the business of domesticity" but it doesn't make his job of raising two boys and running the town's paper any easier.

When Brandon Piece, an effeminate gay teenager is brutally murdered in his parents' bedroom following an alcohol soaked high-school keg party, all eyes turn to Pete and Daniel. Both were familiar with the boy - Pete through school and Daniel as a part-time friend. Brandon was picked on and vilified by almost everyone in the community, and the discovery that Pete's best friend Lee Tysinger was not just having an affair with Brandon but probably murdered him, shocks Pete and Daniel to the core.

Scared of what will happen to them if they testify, the boys hit the road in their '68 Falcon, ending up in Washington, where Daniel gets a taste of life in the big city, and where Pete tries to emotionally reconnect with his closeted gay brother. On the road with the windows open and the joints passing between them, the brothers begin to realize how alike they actually are. Leaving Trent however, makes them chief suspects in Brandon's murder.

So much of Pete's life has taken place outside his body, he's dragged through the hallways of school and out of cars of people he had nothing at all to say to and thought way beneath him. So much of his day is spent floating, far above the parking lots of Laundromats and suburban woods. Thomas questions his own "put-uponess," the lack of spontaneity in his life, all the ways in which a world had tramped him down. And Daniel, just coming out as gay, thinks of the torture of making false claims to the world; he wants so desperately to get away from Trent and his few friends and even his family.

Parker uses beautiful and measured prose to effectively evoke the complex emotional landscape of these three very different men. He also excels at describing the wasted backdrop of a small town where the only entertainment for the young is the Glam Rock-A-Rama, a Laundromat frequented by "washed out young mothers with too many kids and a wretched enough trailer life." Imbued with a kind of thrilleresque pacing, Virginia Lovers is part taught murder mystery and part curiously affecting road novel. It is the clever combination of these two genres that make this story such a riveting, absorbing, and deeply satisfying read. Mike Leonard April 05.

I stumbled across this one on Amazon, described as "an arresting story of brotherhood and betrayal, deceit and desire, set against the backdrop of a country embroiled by social change." Such recaps usually make me run the other way, but the basic underlying story ... the mysterious death of a gay teen ... sparked my interest.

In "Virginia Lovers," Parker presents a very powerful dramatic tale about the emotional distance between parents and teens, even in settings like small town Trent, North Carolina, which parents might think is an ideal atmosphere in which to grow up. Thomas is the owner of the town's weekly newspaper, and deeply involved in his work to the exclusion of real communication with his wife, Caroline, and their two teenage sons. Of the two, Thomas is really concerned only about younger Pete, who seems to have no ambition and spends his daze in a pot-induced haze. His older son, Daniel, is the quiet straight-A student who recently went out for the school's football team, to present a well-rounded image for the prestigious scholarship he has a good chance at snagging. The report of the death of the gay teen, an acquaintance of both boys, eventually points back on possible involvement by one or both of them, which joins them in an unlikely alliance to leave town and avoid the questions they would rather not have to answer. Can't tell much more about it without revealing several key plot twists, but this is a book worth reading. I give it five stars out of five.

Virginia Lovers is not yet another of those cute gay Young Adult novels most readers like, above all since, the gay character that I probably liked more, Brandon, is already dead when the novel begins.

Brandon was a gay teenager in a Southern small town in 1975... do I need to add something more to let you understand how difficult his life was? Brandon didn't hide that he was gay, and from here and there I understood that he wanted an ordinary "teenager" life like all his peers, a boyfriend, a relationship, being loved... all of it was impossible for him, and for desperately trying to have it he was killed.

Daniel and Pete are brothers but they couldn't be more different. Daniel is the perfect student, destined to great things, Pete is the bad boy that almost no one, maybe neither his parents, think will go far in his life. But Daniel and Pete were raised at the same way and given the same opportunities, so why they are so different? Maybe since Daniel is gay? Actually Pete didn't know, and when he is told is also the moment when he apprehends who is Brandon's killer.

Even if they don't really like each other, at least not at that moment, Daniel and Pete understand they need to leave that town if they want to stay alive, and so they take the car his father gave them, and hightailed in Washington, where, for the first time, both of them have the chance to experiment the life out of that oppressive small town. But unfortunately it's not running away that you can solve your trouble, and most of the time trouble finds you again.

There is a wonderful character and it's that of Daniel and Pete's father, Thomas. A reporter with big idea of social issues and human rights when he graduated, he is not managing the local newspaper, diluting the news to make them more digestible to the more conservative readers. It's more important who is sponsoring the newspaper than who has rights to be defended. But Thomas will not close the eyes in front of the true, not this time, and not even since apparently his sons are involved in a murder. I'm not saying that he does everything right and in time, and sincerely, I found a little cold his attitude when drama will fall upon his family, but at least he will be able to support his family, and do the right thing in the end.

More than a gay novel, this is a family novel. True, Daniel is gay, but he is not the only main characters, a lion share goes to both his brother Pete than his father Thomas, and even if you will not listen her speak often, even his mother Caroline leaves to the reader the impression of a strong woman who loves her sons, despite all, or maybe given all.

A very real portrayal of the tragedy of miscommunication within a family, this story is told in carefully drawn, emotional scenes that make you ache for the two brothers and their very confused father. Parker is a master at what is said and unsaid within families. One of those Thelma and Louise situations where you are constantly saying, no, don't go there, don't do that, but the characters can't help themselves. Like Parker's other books, an intimate and traumatic experience for readers because the story-telling is so seamless and credible.

Michael Parker makes brave, difficult choices in this novel. While the protagonists live and wander in the South, this story, in part about acceptance of a homosexual son, is taking place all over the world, today as much as it did back in the 70s. The time markers give the story an authoritative texture familiar to any reader over twenty-five. While Parker mines the emotional and spiritual, he makes sure that things happen throughout the book and reader won't be able to help getting wrapped up in the plot. Indeed I wish I could have spent more time with the characters. Very worthwhile.

It's a wonderful short novel--you can tell the author cares about the people in this story. Not only that but he's an artist. Parker's short story in the December 2004 OXFORD AMERICAN is a must read.

While it seems unlikely and isn't popular to berate a praised literary writer, I thought this book missed its mark.

The story of a family in the 1970s dealing with a murder, the book perhaps best captures a frustrated father's life as a small-town newspaper editor. His relationship with his wife, though she is peripheral as a character, is interestingly drawn. They have 2 sons, Danny, who we figure and later discover is gay and who is the "good son," and Pete, the wild one. That easy stereotype bothered me.

A good re-thinking and re-doing of this story could have made it great. The quiet desperation throughout the novel is not particularly unique, especially for literary fiction. It is only a "gay" novel because the murder victim is an effeminate gay teen and Danny is gay. That theme simply feels applied artifically to the story. This is actually a novel about the father.

Also, why the 1970s? There were a few weak references to the times, and the murder of a tormented gay teen could easily still happen these days. To me, if an author picks an era to portray, there had better be a good reason.

The story is not 100 percent dull, but the characters of the two sons and their eventual closeness is by far the most interesting aspect of the story. The murder aspects felt like an editor or someone suggested to "beef up" the story. The father going into the police station to find out more details now & again almost felt like a cookie-cutter mystery that had been cut-and-pasted into a literary read. And the endless details of who was where, and who really did it, and not rendered as a surprise, and you will probably find you don't care much.

The climax? A disappointment. While Danny's thoughts at the story's resolution are rich and good, the ending "incident" feels like someone rubber-stamped the manuscript, "Put climax to the story here and make it dramatic."

There are many other better books out there. Don't get this if you're looking for a gay-themed novel, because you'll be disappointed. But if you like literary novels about family life, this might suit you.