Up Your Alley Street Fair

Photos by Steven Underhill the novel, many will touch; more will move on.

San Francisco’s 40th annual Up Your Alley Street Fair on July 30 welcomed thousands of revelers in a diverse array of kink, leather, furry and other almost indescribable gear. See plenty more photos on BARtab’s Facebook page, facebook.com/lgbtsf.nightlife. See more of Steven Underhill’s photos at StevenUnderhill.com.

Like that cover, Duncan provides his stories in three sections, called “negatives,” presented in reverse order. For all its surface and latent sensationalism, Duncan’s story is quite ordinary by present-day standards.

An Nebraska-born trans male known to others by the nickname Ponyboy moves to Paris for no more pressing reason than that, like Doro- thy’s Oz, it’s not the Great Plains anymore. In Paris, he lives with his girlfriend, Baby. They’re poets, but this isn’t “La Boheme.” Almost heroically, they consume piles of powder and rivers of booze between “readings.”

When Baby gets a job in Berlin, Ponyboy follows. Things get worse. More men enter the picture. He hits bottom spectacularly, Berlin being one of those places, like Bangkok, where people famously go with that single goal. Then it’s back to the Midwest, Iowa this time, for some overdue if promising recovery. Phoenix rises from the ashes.

Of all the things “Ponyboy” is, it’s at heart an addiction story –parable, really– with a standard, predictable arc that lingers over the “drunkalogue” because it’s so much better copy.

The problem with addiction stories is that they are, like addiction itself, fundamentally boring, if only for all the repetition. The addict and a segment of his audience stay entertained, but people outside the blast radius have either heard it all before or don’t want to sit for the repeats.

There’s an appropriately drunken quality to the prose of the first two sections (negatives three and two, respectively): the darting in and out of time; the broken sentences; the skewed time frames; confusing changes of speaker within paragraphs from which quotation marks have been banished. Any narrative gain is offset by the superficiality of the elements and the skirting of the psychological issues.

The prose sobers up with the return to Iowa. Like many newly sober people, Ponyboy can’t shut up, but there’s banality and something dangerously close to preaching just beneath the surface. The writing feels imitative, if not always of exactly what. The novel has too indistinct an authorial voice to accommodate the voices of its other characters.

When Duncan is not bending the words to his will (there’s a fair amount of bending, mostly over, in this novel), some inviting prose floats in. Of a gray Berlin morning:

“We sat in Tempelhof and the sun ate away at our hangovers.”

“I reminded myself not to compare our articulations of masculinity.”

With a dash of Silicon-ese:

“Toni steps down the hill. My/their skirt, unzippered on their hips, falls thoughtfully. The reach to hold onto it, pleats in the wind. Their bare legs uninstall gender.”

Getting drunk with Gabriel over a song blasting in a bar, Ponyboy’s “blood chimes in the syncopated notes of my heart. Some deep part of me falls to my stomach in a colossal note. A vibrational sureness pulses in the cock-crux of me.”

The overwriting is chronic and intrusive. It even takes the form of quotations or invocations from the likes of Nietzsche and Freud, who haunt the paragraphs. It sometimes resorts to orthographical special effects to do what words can’t or for the moment won’t. There’s some pasted-in “art.”

The subject matter is deliberately disturbing, but it’s the autofiction that’s creepy. Duncan is an alum of the legendary Iowa Writers’ Project, about which we’ve read a lot over the years, since it has not only hatched fine writers but also has served as the setting of recent gay novels.

What feels derivative about “Ponyboy” is the way it shadows the major gay novel of the Iowans. On the surface, there’s the expat stories. Then, its three sections mirror those of “What Belongs to You,” with similar diversions into the ruminations on the sins of the father. Front and center, there’s the candor about sex and the raw depictions of it, which have come to feel de rigueur in a certain strand of gay literary fiction.

In a time of book bans, there’s some cause for celebration that such a book can get published at all. But for a deeper look into the means and mysteries of transgender lives, Susan Faludi’s “In the Darkroom” remains the gold standard.t

‘Ponyboy’ by Eliot Duncan. 232 pp., $16.95 www.wwnorton.com