A Push and a Shove

I hardly ever read gay fiction anymore, whatever that phrase means (to me, novels with gay--or sexually ambiguous--protagonists, and usually written by a gay author; I can only think off the top of my head of two "gay" novels I've read that are by straight authors: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon [in which the main character wasn't really gay] and The Dreyfus Affair by Peter Lefcourt [which was an off-the-wall comedy]). Most novels aimed at a gay audience these days are either fluffy romances or coming-out stories, and while those genres are important and necessary for gay readers, I'm kind of over them. Yes, we all have coming-out stories and I truly think it's important for us to tell them to others and to ourselves, but I've read enough for now.

So I was pleased to find this book, A Push and a Shove, by Christopher Kelly, a psychological thriller. The narrator, Ben, is bullied in high school by Terrence, a boy he has a crush on. The bullying is mostly verbal, (being called "gaywad" and the like), but one afternoon Terrence goes home with Ben, seemingly to befriend him, but when confronted with actual evidence of Ben's homosexuality, he ends up pushing Ben down the stairs, resulting in a mild concussion and some stitches behind Ben's ear. Terrence moves out of town and the two have no more contact until ten years later when a bullying incident that Ben witnesses leads him to hunt up Terrence to get some kind of revenge. They become friendly and slowly, their roles shift, with Ben becoming something of a bully to Terrence, leading to a suspenseful climax, undercut only by a slightly disappointing ending.

Plotwise, not everything fits together smoothly here; for example, it seems unlikely that Terrence would welcome Ben back in his life so quickly. There's also some other dysfunctional family stuff in Ben's background that is never, to my mind, well integrated into the main story. Still, the book is well written and compelling, and I especially like the author's handling of the unreliable (and sometimes unpleasant) narrator. It becomes clear that we can't completely trust everything Ben tells us, though I was shocked (enough to let out an audible gasp) when full disclosure of how far his unreliability goes is revealed near the end. Blurbs on the cover compare this to a Patricia Highsmith "Ripley" book, and I think that's overstating the case--this is nowhere as bleak and amoral as those books are--but it is a solid thriller and character study.