cover image Letting Loose

Letting Loose

Christopher T. Leland. Zoland Books, $23.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-944072-69-1

Letting loose, indeed. Leland addresses more than a few big themes in a sweeping novel about generational change in the 1960s and '70s. As the novel opens, the town of Rhymers Creek is turning out for the funeral of Bobbo Starwick, its golden-boy football star whose remains, after 25 years, have finally been shipped from Vietnam. There's Fred, a former classmate and teammate, who also served in Nam, and has never adjusted to civilian life. There's Melva, a former lover, trapped in a safe but passionless marriage. And there's Barry, Bobbo's gay half-brother, who has finally returned home after gaining notoriety as a Robert Mapplethorpe-like photographer. Through extended use of flashbacks, Leland (The Book of Marvels; The Professor of Aesthetics) tells their tales. Subtlety of character suffers some as Leland burdens his cast with representing the monumental social changes that have rocked America--the Vietnam war and its aftermath, feminism, gay liberation. The notable exception to this rule is Barry, who emerges wholly sympathetic as Leland convincingly evokes the exhilarating gay scene of New York in the 1970s and the subsequent onset of AIDS. Leland's stitching together of theme and plot is ragged. But he writes with generous feeling, and some beauty, of how Barry, the gay apostate from the American dream, is able, at long last, to join his archetypal hometown as it buries Bobbo, the native son who had been expected, unfairly, to shoulder that dream. (Sept.)