Dave's Book Blog: "The Night Listener" by Armistead Maupin

A cleverly plotted story about truth and fiction.

Gabriel Noone has become famous for reading stories on the radio - he calls them "feel-good penny dreadfuls" (Ch 2) which might be a decent description of this novel. He is contacted by Pete, a boy who has written a book about his childhood hell, sexually abused by his parents, pimped out to men, and forced to make gay porn videos. Gabriel an ageing gay man whose long-term partner has just left him, finds solace in his chats with Pete. But is this telephone relationship quite what it seems to be?

Right from the start, the narrator warns us that he is "a fabulist by trade" and that he embellishes even true stories. He warns Pete against confusing Gabriel's reality with the characters in his radio stories. So the reader knows that Gabriel is an unreliable narrator although the full extent of his duplicity is not revealed until the very end. But how much truth is there in what Pete says? Is lonely Gabriel falling for a hoax perpetrated by an even more unreliable narrator? How much do any of us really know the truth about anything?

That's why I wasn't keen on the Afterword which, rather like the final seven minutes of the film Saltburn, spills the beans with heavy explication. In the case of this book, the justification might be that, by explaining things, it leaves the reader with an even greater realisation that the author has been economical with the actuality. And at least it preserves the core ambiguity.

The plot is nicely woven with the subplot of Gabriel being abandoned by his partner Jess who is trying to 'find himself'. It's nicely paced with clever twists culminating in a snow-bound journey, a sort of Hero's quest in that otherworld Americans call up-state Michigan. I don't think I was ever surprised by a major twist - they were well-signalled and the only twist I missed I felt was an unnecessary way to crank up the tension - but my motivation to keep reading was partly because I was expecting the twist and I wanted to know whether my expectations would be confirmed. At first I was disappointed by the ending: I wanted resolution and I felt its lack was because the author himself couldn't decide which of two possibilities to endorse. On second thoughts, however, I think the ambiguous ending was probably intended from the start and I like the way it finished (though I still have my doubts about the Afterword).

It is narrated in the first person which makes the uncertainties more visceral and the past tense. I have previously found that this author has an expectation that the reader shares his cultural milieu, for example with references to commercial products, which included, in this novel, Triscuits, the Castro, and a Rocky and Bullwinkle cel. Presumably this is done to maximise verisimilitude for his home audience but, if done too much, it can confuse and alienate those outside that target. However, I felt that in this book these were usually - and unobtrusively - explained.

The narrator-protagonist Gabriel is portrayed as someone perhaps a little too sensitive, and gullible, for his own good. The antagonist, though not in the villain sense, is Pete, whom we only know through his phone calls. He is a brilliant writer, still in his early teens. His debut book is a memoir in which he (apparently, we are given no details of this book) describes having been sexually abused from babyhood. He has had syphilis and now has AIDS. He is a fan of Gabriel, whose work he has heard on the radio, and wants Gabriel to write a blurb for his book. They start to exchange phone calls. All at once they have adopted a father (Gabriel) son (Pete) relationship. Very soon, very fast. There are some strangely intimate moments, such as when Pete wants to rest his head on Gabriel's shoulder, through the medium of the phone conversation.

This was, for me, the book's downfall. I couldn't believe in Pete as a character. This is a lad who had been raped repeatedly, and pimped out, by his biological father and he immediately seeks to adopt the needy Gabriel as his telephone father. This is a lad who has been subjected to horrendous abuse, whose parents never even called him by his name, and yet who shows no hint of PTSD. He is portrayed as an occasionally vulnerable tough guy making jokes and trading insults. He even offers relationship advice to Gabriel, talking about love. Not only does he have a surprisingly wise head on his young shoulders, but also he sounds like a counsellor. As a character, he reminded me of Kya, the protagonist in Where the Crawdads Sing by Della Owens, another child neglected by her parents who manages to bring herself up, on her own, in the middle of a marsh, even learning to read in a single summer. In other words, Pete and Kya are too good to be true.

It seemed to me that the phone calls with Pete were a fantasy sequence set in what was otherwise a mundane and everyday description of Gabriel's problems with his boyfriend, Jess - a shadowy character whose main function seem to be to leave Gabriel broken-hearted and therefore vulnerable and, at the end of Act One, to advance the plot lurchingly into Act Two - and his wonderfully bigoted and cantankerous father. This is told with a mass of details and seemingly unimportant incidents which underpin the verisimiltude and the feeling of ordinariness. This was the perfect counterpoint to the fantasy; it grounded and anchored it and made it seem possible.

But I was a jump ahead of the twist.

It is very much structured in three acts. The first act is about making contact with Pete (at 8%) and the relationship becoming deeper. A big question mark arises at 37% and we move into the second act in which uncertainty is the theme. The third act is mostly the 'hero's quest' with a final twist (which I also saw coming) at the 85% mark.

It was quick and easy to read and very entertaining. The plot was cleverly constructed and I liked the theme although I'm still in two minds about the Afterword. The biggest flaw was in the antagonist.

Apparently it is based on a true story.

Selected quotes:

"I know how it sounds when I call him my son. ... I've noticed the looks on people's faces ... It's easy enough to see how they've pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else's child." (Ch 1)
"I've spent years looting my life for fiction. Like a magpie, I save the shiny stuff and discard the rest; it's of no use to me if it doesn't serve the geometry of the story." (Ch 1)
"Most stories have holes in them that cry out for jewelled elephants." (Ch 1)
"He'd use a ten-dollar word when a ten-cent one would do." (Ch 2)
"There are moments, I think, when you actually feel your life changing, when all you can all but hear the clumsy clank and bang of fate's machinery." (Ch 3)
"He'd work my nipples like a ravenous baby ... until I came with a fury, feeling the rough hemp of his chest across my belly, that silken cock against my leg, or in my astonished hand." (Ch 4)
"His eyes were his most arresting feature: a pale, glowing green that stopped you cold with their sheer unlikelihood. Like those pretty stones you find on the beach sometimes that prove, upon closer examination, to be fragments of a pop bottle, roughed up by the ocean." (Ch 4) Even in this arresting description, the author hints that maybe not all is as it seems.
"I spent days sifting through the litter that Wayne had left as an autobiography." (Ch 6) When my Aunt Marion died she left a cupboard full of slide transparencies showing scenes from her many holidays. It broke my heart to throw them out. Our most treasured possessions become junk after we die.
"The heart is measured by how much you love, not by how much you are loved by others. Fuckin' Hitler was loved by others." (Ch 7) Sometimes Pete's feel-good philosophising sounds far too mature for his tender age and untender experience.
"I had learned to jerk off earlier that year, but the experience had seemed more of a medical emergency than an act of lust." (Ch 9)
"There were pleasant farmsteads and dark green forests and countless ponds winking through the birches like pocket mirrors." (Ch 20)
"Is that what it means to get old? I wondered. To revert to the helplessness of infancy without any of the fun?" (Ch 25)