The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Whose Song? and Other Stories by Thomas Glave
Richard Murphy

Thomas Glave. Whose Song? and Other Stories. City Lights, 2000. 249 pp. $12.95.

This collection follows the success of the title story, “Whose Song?,” which won the O. Henry award in 1997. That story—a difficult one revealing the desires of three black men in the rape and murder of a black woman—is the urgent culmination of the collection. Each of its nine stories focuses on the tight constraint of convention on gay black men and women and frequently on the resulting violence. The narration maintains a speed and rhythm that verges on hysteria. Glave elsewhere remarks that he seeks a “precise kind of propulsion, and tempo”; when it works, as it does in “—And Love Them?” and “Whose Song?,” it is extraordinarily effective. The white woman who narrates “—And Love Them?” had been made love to by a black man whom she valued, but for whom she lost her feeling in the act. In her world, the black man is stereotypical, and her descriptions ironically apply immediately to herself, without recognition. Her lack of understanding—of herself as well as of blacks—creates the void in which she lives and moves. In “Whose Song?” the males act to overcome their potentially gay identities and establish their manhood on a light-skinned woman who loves another girl. Walking up and through a wooded area at Sound Hill, she dreams of escape from men, only to find an awful death at their hands. The epic/blues/communal narrative voice captures the ache of frustration at a dead-end existence, and the fear of difference. This fear defines the collection, though it propels the narration to a kind of sameness that, to some extent, vitiates its power, creating an unfortunate distance between it and some characters it presents. Nonetheless, this work—praised by Gloria Naylor and Clarence Major, among others—deserves notice. [Richard Murphy.]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Whose Song? and Other Stories by Thomas Glave Richard Murphy Thomas Glave. Whose Song? and Other Stories. City Lights, 2000. 249 pp. $12.95. This collection follows the success of the title story, “Whose Song?,” which won the O. Henry award in 1997. That story—a difficult one revealing the desires of three black men in the rape and murder of a black woman—is the urgent culmination of the collection. Each of its nine stories focuses on the tight constraint of convention on gay black men and women and frequently on the resulting violence. The narration maintains a speed and rhythm that verges on hysteria. Glave elsewhere remarks that he seeks a “precise kind of propulsion, and tempo”; when it works, as it does in “—And Love Them?” and “Whose Song?,” it is extraordinarily effective. The white woman who narrates “—And Love Them?” had been made love to by a black man whom she valued, but for whom she lost her feeling in the act. In her world, the black man is stereotypical, and her descriptions ironically apply immediately to herself, without recognition. Her lack of understanding—of herself as well as of blacks—creates the void in which she lives and moves. In “Whose Song?” the males act to overcome their potentially gay identities and establish their manhood on a light-skinned woman who loves another girl. Walking up and through a wooded area at Sound Hill, she dreams of escape from men, only to find an awful death at their hands. The epic/blues/communal narrative voice captures the ache of frustration at a dead-end existence, and the fear of difference. This fear defines the collection, though it propels the narration to a kind of sameness that, to some extent, vitiates its power, creating an unfortunate distance between it and some characters it presents. Nonetheless, this work—praised by Gloria Naylor and Clarence Major, among others—deserves notice. [Richard Murphy.]

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