When you read a writer who slowly and precisely loves his characters into being, the love that fuels the story gets transferred to you; this is why reading a good book of stories can return you back to your own life feeling more generous, and in the case of an excellent writer like Bill Gaythwaite, more insightful, and more patient. Bill Gaythwaite is masterful at giving us wonderfully flawed characters whose ways of seeing their world, and their selves, make them curiously endearing. While Gaythwaite never lets them off the hook, you can feel fresh compassion for them seeping through, even when they’re at their worst, such as the narrator in the wonderful title story who takes advantage of his lover, an older man who Gaythwaite’s narrator reveals as kind and dignified and vulnerable— “the sweetest person I’d ever known. His sweetness fizzed up from deep within him like a secret spring or something.” Sweetness doesn’t buy this narrator’s love, or even respect, until later in life when he looks back and understands the cost of his deceit, and how it deprived not only his lover, but himself, of anything like genuine love. He earns my respect for his ability to understand his own limitations, and to perceive with hope his capacity for authenticity. The story, like most stories in this exceptional book, shines light on the power of retrospect. That particular story also gives us the depth, tension, and arc of a novel, along with inviting us to meditate on the power of lies to decimate trust, and how economic forces are always at play.
Gaythwaite well understands how class differences can often cast life-altering shadows. In “The Disaster Book,” a young man fears his easy childhood has been too much of a shield, never having wanted for anything, as they say, and falls in love with a young woman who was raised by a mother who works as a cleaner, and an unemployed father. He comes to see this class difference as his ticket to feeling deeper emotion, which he sees as having eluded him. In ‘Little Bandits” we see the gap between two friends has irrevocably widened, in part, as a result of one friend becoming college educated .
It’s refreshing to read stories where gay characters just live their lives and their loves, without making the central focus on their sexuality. I loved how in “If Only You Knew,” another excellent story told by a narrator who becomes lovable for his keen insight, dark humor, snarky observations, and ability to make a whole world spring to life for us— tells us of his younger brother, another character who, like the lover from the title story, is “grounded and kind. Kindness is Wiley’s special gift.” We learn that Wiley “settles down with a wonderful guy named Grady who sings in a bluegrass band…” His quality of kindness, quietly revealed both in childhood and adulthood, outshines any mention of his being gay. This kind of representation is still uncommon, but becoming less so, and that says, perhaps, something good about our world, despite the forces still arrayed against LGBTQ people everywhere.
