Review: Almost Good
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 26, 2013
Disclaimer: I got this story free from Daily Lit. I'd never read anything by this author before. I never will again. He's a good enough writer. It doesn't bother me that all his characters were stereotypes. That's true for most novels and short stories (regardless of the medium: movie, TV, manga, etc.). I was asked to write a review in exchange for the story. I haven't been paid to write this.I have to agree with a few of the negative reviews that it seems unlikely that a religious family from Ohio would allow their 14-year-old daughter to live with a male homosexual couple in New York City. I have religious relatives in Ohio. They would know that Eddie and partner are gay. That might not deter them from saving money by having their "Dinah" stay with them, but they would have done a better job of checking out the quality of the ballet camp. One can find mediocre ballet teachers everywhere, so sending Dinah to NYC wouldn't be an option in the first place. The plot's a bit unrealistic, but the NYC gay scene isn't.I was put off by all the characters. There's no way that I can identify with Dinah: we have nothing in common but our humanity. I had trouble identifying with Holden Caulfield in Salinger's _A Catcher in the Rye_. I reread that after 50 years and found myself wondering what I'd liked about it other than the descriptions of the disgusting habits of Holden's roommate Ackley. Perhaps it was that I was just as alienated in high school as Holden was.I really liked _On The Road_, however. And William S. Burroughs' novels _Junky_ (_Junkie_) and _Naked Lunch_. But Burroughs was even more dissolute than Eddie and his friends. I don't identify with drug addicts or sex addicts either. Give me James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence or Laurence Sterne or Thomas Hardy any day. Or Dickens. Or, especially, George Eliot (she was a brilliant writer, so much more interesting than the punctilious Jane Austen, whose writing immediately puts me to sleep).Luis seems to function as an apologist for Eddie and his gang. I couldn't believe him. He was just a literary convenience for this allegory of a story. I would hardly call this a "coming of age" story. How many 14-year-olds come of age in this way? Very few, I suspect.Eddie's fashion designer friend seems like an accurate enough cardboard cutout of the fashion scene players in NYC. Whenever I watch models walking down the runway showing off the latest in exhibitionist "Hey, look at me and what I'm wearing today" apparel, that kind of person comes to mind. At least she was kind to Dinah."Almost Tall" is not for everyone. Only the most 1-dimensional characters were likable (except, of course, for the two girls that Dinah stayed with when Eddie et al. were allegedly going to spend the weekend on Fire Island. But they were realistic stereotypes. I've been there and done that). The 2-dimensional characters were grotesque.I have a friend who's been writing homosexual novels for decades. (He claims that he's not a homosexual but a pederast: I suppose that means he's not much different from the former Penn State coach whose alleged sexual depredations a year or so ago caused so much shock and awe in the overly sex-obsessed but still prudish USA.) He's a very good writer. I've never been interested in reading any of his stories. He's never offered to let me read any of them either: he was afraid they'd put me off, just like the Chinese waiter at Hong Fat's in NYC's Chinatown in 1971, who said, when I asked him what the Chinese couple were eating, "Oh, you wouldn't like that. Only Chinese people can eat that". He was probably right.The author of this story has a long way to go before he's as creatively offensive as John Irving in the horrible rape scene in _The World According to Garp_ (a novel made palatable to me only because of Robin Williams' performance in the movie).I cannot recommend this story, but I thank DailyLit.com for giving me the chance to read it.