The Review of Contemporary Fiction
In the City of Shy Hunters by Tom SpanbauerDavid Bergman
Tom Spanbauer. In the City of Shy Hunters. Grove, 2001. 504 pp. $26.00.
William Parker (aka William of Heaven) comes to New York (the Wolf Swamp) to find his lover/blood brother Charlie Moons (Fred) who has disappeared from the MFA program at Columbia University. Will appears in the Lower East Side in 1984 and immediately finds himself at the center of the performance art scene and in the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. He is befriended by Rose (Argwings Khodek), a black drag actor of legendary fame in Alphabet City; by Fiona Yet (Muffy MacIlvain, Susan Strong), a child of an adoring, wealthy, liberal family; and by True Shot (Peter Morales), a handsome Latino who has started his own moving business, Spirit Schleppers, out of his Dodge van. By the time the novel ends, Will’s closest friends are either dead, driven insane, or exiled from Wolf Swamp. Set during the Reagan years, this may be the first novel of the Bush II regime, for it blasts a compassionate conservativism that proved itself callous, mean-spirited, and smugly self-aggrandizing. It portrays a social hierarchy that is downright hostile to the dispossessed, the homeless, the different, the sick and the spiritually hungry-in short, all the "shy hunters" who are the true inhabitants of the city. As Ruby tells Will, the world is divided between Fools and Pharisees. If the politics are a bit simple, the lines between Them and Us a bit too easily drawn, In the City of Shy Hunters nevertheless speaks with a deep-throated passion for the downtrodden that is chilling, moving, and far too rare these days. [David Bergman]