Martin and John

by Dale Peck Narrated by Andrew Eiden

Overview

Dale Peck's debut is a tour de force in which Martin and John find each other again and again: in a trailer park, a high-end jewelry store, a Kansas barn, and later, in New York City, living under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Though their names remain the same, their identities are constantly shifting, creating a fractured view of loss and desire in the early years of the AIDS crisis. Vaulting through self and history, Martin and John is one of the most remarkable novels to emerge from an America ravaged by disease, and one of the finest and most complex love stories of the '90s.

Martin and John is the first volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books which follow the character of John as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

Editorial Reviews

Michiko Kakutani

Astonishing...If this fiercely written novel offers an indelible portrait of gay life during the plague years, it also opens out to become a universal story about love and loss and the redemptive powers of fiction...A stunning debut.-- The New York Times

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

With this poetic, tightly compressed novel, Peck makes a head-turning debut on the literary scene. It is composed of a feverish sequence of vignettes, which the reader gradually learns are the reminiscences of John, a gay man, as he tries to come to terms with the death of his lover, Martin, from AIDS. Some episodes straightforwardly recount John's life: abused by his hostile father, he escapes to New York and survives by becoming a hustler; he falls in love with Martin, and moves with him to Kansas, where Martin dies. Alternating with this account are ``stories'' written by John, in each of which different, spiritual versions of the narrator (named John) and of a chameleonic character named Martin work their way through states of need, surrender and bereavement. Subtle but highly charged, the fragments carry the reader continually deeper into human mystery, and what we at first hear as a fugue on the destructive powers of sexual desire evolves rapidly into a lay psalm that proclaims both the necessity of love and its inevitable loss. Peck's operatic intensity and lyric grief come tumbling out in these pages; this is very much a young man's novel, but its flaws are also emblems of its power. Though the symbolism is often obvious, and the writing so pitched that it would seem excessive in less talented hands, the narrative plunges forward on a wildly romantic course. (Jan.)

Library Journal

John, our 19-year-old narrator, escapes from an abusive family to New York and meets Martin. They fall in love. Martin develops AIDS, they move to Kansas, and Martin dies. Throughout the narrative are stories written by John after Martin's death about a couple that is always named Martin and John, though they are different characters. This kind of structural complexity would be enough to sink most novels, but Peck writes so splendidly that it is a pleasure just to keep on reading. By themselves, some of these stories are among the most powerful representations of gay life written. Together, these tales of sexual and emotional abuse, antigay violence, and AIDS read too much like a litany of the sorrows of gay men; at times, the elegiac tone is overblown. Yet this remains an exciting first novel by a 24-year-old author. Recommended for public libraries, particularly with strong gay and lesbian collections.-- Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P.L.

From the Publisher

Praise for Martin and John

“[Dale Peck's] wisdom about human feelings, his talent for translating those feelings into prose and his sophisticated mastery of literary form all speak to a maturity that belies his twenty-five years. In short, a stunning debut.”
—The New York Times

“How do you write a novel that describes the impact AIDS has had on you and still take into account all the other people who are suffering the consequences of the disease? Dale Peck has come up with his answer in Martin and John—a book that marks the debut of a remarkably accomplished young writer. In this kaleidoscopic novel, separate stories come together to form a shifting picture of gay life in the time of AIDS . . . [Martin and John] simultaneously reflects one man’s experience and the experiences of many men.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Peck’s first novel has a dark brilliance and moments of real beauty, but it is a book that is shocking, hard to accept fully, and hard to ignore.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Martin and John is one of the more inspired and brilliant novels that deal not only with AIDS but with the grief and bereavement that are inescapably a part of every life.”
—The Nation

"Remains a sophisticated literary response to the AIDS crisis."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Alternative readings are the key to Dale Peck’s aesthetic—one so sophisticated and, for the most part, so masterfully realized that it is hard to believe Peck is only twenty-five. This is his first full-length work but, ingeniously, it functions both as a novel and as a collection of short stories . . . Peck can handle notoriously difficult subjects—AIDS, child abuse and sadomasochistic sex not just explicitly, but with a sincerity free of all melodrama. As he orchestrates a structural puzzle of fictions within fictions, he also moves towards a heartwrending autobiographical truth.”
—The Independent

“Dale Peck is what we've been waiting for, a new talent with vast ambitions and a voice like an angel chewing on broken glass. Martin and John launches an important career.”
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

“These are elegant, nightmarish variations on two compressed, mordant themes: love in the time of AIDS and the eternally fragile politics of domestic desire . . . The somber lyricism, the fresh conception of form, the profoundly human grasp of character all suggest this touchingly young writer will have a great future.”
—Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story

“Dale Peck’s first novel is a wounding, extraordinarily honest story with a promiscuous narrative energy and honed stylistic gift that can only mark the arrival of a prodigious talent.”
—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm

“Martin and John could not have been written at any time but now and not by any other writer than Dale Peck. He is that rare phenomenon—an original—and his book is mysterious, solemn and full with feeling.”
—Susan Minot, author of Rapture

“Dale Peck’s novel is about the darkness and sexual chaos in the lives of middle-American families, and about love and passion in the midst of plague. From beginning to end, Martin and John is wrenching and unflinching—charged with the exhilarating magic of a bold, new voice.”
—Joyce Johnson, author of Minor Characters

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172698279
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	06/11/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Blue Wet - Paint
Columns

This is not the worst thing I remember: coming home from school one day to find my mother in a chair, collapsed. Her skin was the color of wet ashes, her head sat like a stone on her right shoulder, and a damp bloody mass pushed at hercrotch, staining a maroon patch of darkness on sky-blue pants. Her legs were spread wide, and more blood, pooling on the yellow vinyl of the chair, showed up like the red speck in a spoiled egg yolk. Her arms were open too, and rested on the chair arms, and she seemed both empty and full, like a tubeof toothpaste squeezed from the middle. When I walked into the room, I was ten years old, and the sound her blood made as it dropped to the floor filled my ears. Is she still alive? I remember thinking, and then, when I noticed the slow, small movements of her chest, I thought, She still isn't dead. I raninto the living room then, where I called my father, and I waited for him on the couch, shivering. Not seeing her was worse than seeing her, for I imagined her, imagined the mound that had been building in her abdomen for months.

It had grown even as the rest of her body had shrunk, until she seemed nothing more than a skeleton covered by the thin fabric of clothing and skin. just a skeleton, and that hard mound at her center, which my father sometimes ran his hands over as though testing a melon for ripeness. For years I saw that melon drop from my mother's body again and again, pushing at the seam of her pants in a mess of blood and guts and lost life. Not the baby's-my mother's.

This story started before I was aware of it. Though two people were in a position to tell it, they wereboth, I believe, unable to speak. How could my mother, a housewife who remembered her high school graduation as a severe bout of morning sickness, sit me on her lap and say, "John, your father is killing me," when speaking would reveal at least some level of complicity on her part? And how could my father, a construction worker who lucked into a lot of money when he opened his own company, sit me down and say, "John, all we can do is wait for her to die," when he knew it was his fault she was dying? So no one said anything-I wasn't even told my mother had miscarried, and no attempt was made to explain why I'd found her sitting in her own blood. In time my father referred to it as if I knew what had happened. "When your mother lost the baby," he'd say, as if she'd set it down, forgotten where. Other things were set down with that baby, forgotten, and one of them was the woman who bore it: my mother, whose black-and-white past was obliterated by that technicolor moment in the kitchen. A too-bright image superimposed itself on a dark one and only occasionally could a piece of that hidden picture reveal itself.

Over time I learned that my mother's miscarriage was the product of a muscle disorder that lay dormant for years, waiting for something like the strain of bearing a baby to flare up. Someone once told me she'd been ill after my birth, but when I asked my father about it he only said, "You got out Of the hospital before she did." Now, looking back, this and a half dozen other signals pop up like road signs pointing to her illness. She was always dropping things: glasses held in both her hands still managed to slip to the floor, and forkfuls of food spilled to her lap on the way to her mouth. If she was tired this got worse, and sometimes, late at night, her speech became slurred, though she never drank with my father. When she got pregnant, her deterioration accelerated. My father joked it off. "Rosemary," he'd say-her name was Beatrice-"and her baby," and on the last word he'd rub the mound of her stomach. My mother never laughed at this, I noticed at once, but it took me a while to see that my father didn't either. She'd turn back to what she was doing, cooking dinner maybe, or copying a recipe from a magazine. Years later, a flip through her card file revealed the definite progression of her disease: her handwriting started out smooth and rolling, and then in the years just before she miscarried it began to jumble about frantically like the lines of an EKG. And then gradually, inevitably, it became as flat as stagnant water.

In a way, all I know now is all I knew then: that she suffered from a progressive muscle disorder which destroyed her motor control and left her a quadriplegic, unable to walk or speak or hold her head up; this disease actually killed her when she was forty-four years old, but for the last twelve years of her life she was in a facility on the eastern edge of Long Island, a hospice, while my father and I lived fifteen hundred miles away in Kansas, and it often seems like she died when she was only thirty-two. She was twenty-nine when she came home from the hospital for the first time, in a wheelchair. This eventually gave way to a whining electric one, but at the time she was too weak to work a joystick and had to be pushed around by my father. When I heard the car in the driveway that day, my first impulse was to hide, but I forced myself into the living room just as the front door slammed open. All I saw was my father's shadowy form, huge, hulking, framed by late-afternoon light, leaning over my mother. At first I thought she'd fallen...

Martin and John. Copyright © by Dale Peck. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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