Review: A unique voice in modern gay literature
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 31, 2013
I loved "Cranberry Hush," by Ben Monopoli - and all my fellow readers were telling me I needed to read this. It sat on my Kindle for months, and finally, I just plunged in.Ben Monopoli is a wonderful writer.  Elegant and literate, but very contemporary and, dare I say, young. His voice is young - he writes in the words of the generation of my children. (If only my children were so literate!)I struggled into this wonderful book because of my own resistance to two key elements at its core: Fletcher's fecklessness and Mateo's graffiti. I struggled to love these two young men because they each are so opposed to my own hard-wired nature.  Fletcher, burned by bad romances in college, has turned to a position of anti-romance, embracing a life of one-nighters. He's both annoying and pitiable - to someone like me. His only good feature at first was his warm relationship with best friends Cara and Jamar. He's a good friend to them, and that gave me an inkling of hope from the start.And Mateo - well. How to start?  Emotionally, he's right in sync with my own overwrought romantic self. Passionate, Brazilian, courtly in fact. But graffiti - because that's what drives Mateo - is something for which I have a visceral antipathy. I had to work hard to release my ingrained reverence for private property and civic order so that I could love Mateo properly.But, in the end, I let both these fraught characters in, because they let each other in, and in their relationship I saw Fletcher being gradually turned into someone else - someone I wanted him to be from the start.  Mateo, on the other hand, remained a Poe-like figure, romantic but obsessed in a way that boded ill. I cared for him and feared for him.There is a crucial flourish of magical realism in the ending of this book that startled me and, I confess, somewhat ticked me off.  Part of me feels like it's a cop-out, a clever way to resolve a difficult plotline.  But I struggled a little more, and began to accept it, and embrace it for the poetic beauty is brings to the finale of this remarkable, lovely book.I like my world orderly and predictable.  Ben Monolpoli managed to yank me out of my comfort zone and helped me relish the discomfort.