{"id":171648,"date":"2025-09-12T10:00:32","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T14:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171648"},"modified":"2025-09-11T15:42:52","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T19:42:52","slug":"fall-books-on-george-whitmores-nebraska","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/09\/12\/fall-books-on-george-whitmores-nebraska\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall Books: On George Whitmore\u2019s Nebraska<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

George Whitmore in his New York apartment, 1980. Photograph by James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m going to make a man out of you yet. Parents have probably been making variations on this threat for as long as they\u2019ve had to tolerate weird sons. All sons being weird, that adds up to many threats. But some sons are queer; what then? Two years before his death from AIDS<\/small> in 1989, George Whitmore\u2014a one-time member of the Violet Quill, the short-lived early-eighties gay-male writing group that also included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran\u2014published his third and final novel, Nebraska, <\/em>on the theme of anguished man-making. The long-out-of-print text asks what combination of forces and tactics might induce manhood in a fruity kid: isolation, kidnapping, alcoholism, neglect? Now the Song Cave has reissued the book, and, in addition to an inventory of mom-and-pop solutions for correcting aberrant masculinities, we\u2019ve recovered a perfect expression of horniness: \u201cThere came a singing in my head.\u201d Desire is an earworm.<\/p>\n

Nebraska<\/em> is a stubby gay bildungsroman that tracks an amputee named Craig Mullen, our narrator, from his bedridden preteens in fifties Flyoverlandia to his desperate twenties in SoCal. The novel is a stomach turner that plays sick tricks on the reader. Craig levels false accusations of sexual abuse against a closeted family member, and the results are catastrophic, as his relative undergoes a forced infantilization that runs parallel to Craig\u2019s growing up. When Craig encounters the man again years later, genuine abuse rockets into the frame as a kind of outrageous punchline. The prospect of happiness for the gay characters of this era is rendered as a book-length joke. The novel twists its horrors into funny shapes, like balloon animals filled with poison gas.<\/p>\n

I laughed, then, in a hysterical, disgusted, admiring way, at Whitmore\u2019s audacity. Craig\u2019s matter-of-fact recollections of post-amputation torment got me, too. \u201cThe County sent me back to the hospital to break my arm again,\u201d Whitmore writes. \u201cParts of me were now yellow.\u201d Elsewhere, less evil species of comedy warm the prose. When Craig\u2019s sister learns of an affair, she declares, \u201cAnd all this time I didn\u2019t know!\u201d He thinks, \u201cBetty sounded like someone discovering a floorwax on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitmore\u2019s twangy, understated style occasionally erupts into fevered lyricism: here is possibility, here are dreams, both of which, for Craig, involve violence, danger, and the specter of a mercurial father obsessed by a desire to fix his offspring. More often, the sentences lend to a kind of dramatic irony in which the narrator, his guard up, manifests a persona in language that knows less, that feels less, than Craig must. Early in the novel, Whitmore unloads a threat stranger and more pernicious than the age-old proclamations handed down from fathers to sons. \u201cYou are not ever going to be robbed of your precious childhood,\u201d his mama says to him in the hospital, after he\u2019s been \u201cchawed up\u201d by the car that costs him a leg. The only fate worse than becoming a man is getting stranded in adolescence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paul McAdory is a writer from Mississippi. He lives in Brooklyn.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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