Culture clash and unlikely lovers have jump-started a lot of great plots. Yes, you probably know what's going to happen, but if the writing is as richly compassionate as Paul Russell's is in his new novel, War Against the Animals , predictable feels more like perfection.
— Caroline Leavitt
Russell (The Coming Storm, etc.) eloquently explores the divide between gay and straight culture in his latest novel, a thoughtful, provocative study of an attraction that develops between an upscale, retired garden designer who is HIV-positive and a young redneck in a fast-changing upstate New York community. Cameron Barnes is the Manhattan transplant who thinks his love life is over after surviving the barrage of illnesses that come with full-blown AIDS, but Barnes's quiet, idyllic life in Stone Hollow is disrupted when he hires a pair of young brothers, Kyle and Jesse Vanderhof, to fix his dilapidated barn. Initially, Barnes has little contact with the brothers, but a strange attraction slowly develops between the former landscaper and Jesse, who is more sensitive and open-minded than his crude older brother. The backdrop for the romance is a struggle to control the town and its values, filtered through the prism of a mayoral election in which the leader of the powerful Vanderhof clan, Roy, battles a close friend of Cameron's named Max Greenblatt, who represents the interests of the rapidly growing liberal gay community. Russell is a patient, masterful narrator, dexterously alternating scenes featuring Cameron and his gay friends, Jesse grappling with his sexuality and Jesse's controlling brother's scheme to extract money from Cameron. In the hands of a lesser writer, this might have been a clumsy, obvious book, but Russell's compassionate, insightful prose illuminates the differences that help define us under the umbrella of community as well as the sparks that fly when boundaries are violated. Agent, Harvey Klinger. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Cameron Barnes, a middle-aged gay landscape architect living outside a small town in the shadow of the Catskills, hires brothers Kyle and Jesse Vanderhof to renovate his gardening shed. Recovering from the end of a long relationship and struggling with AIDS, Cameron finds himself staring longingly at the young Jesse. Eager to take advantage financially of Cameron's interest in Jesse, homophobic Kyle coerces his younger brother into befriending the gay man. Jesse's sexual confusion (including his guilt over having been sexually exploited as a teenager), his lack of interest in his girlfriend, and his physical attraction to Kyle is exposed as his friendship with Cameron grows. Jesse's inner conflicts mirror tensions in the town of Stone Hollow itself, as its traditions are challenged by an influx of gay residents and by the mayoral campaign of Max Greenblatt, Cameron's oldest gay friend. In his fifth novel, Russell (The Salt Point) successfully reworks his familiar themes of homosexual coming of age, intergenerational relationships, and sexually charged violence. Given its strong character development, fine writing, compelling plot, and riveting climax, this novel will have crossover appeal beyond a gay readership. Recommended for larger fiction collections.-Joseph M. Eagan, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
The collision of small-town phobias and high-priced realities. In search of a relatively stable bucolic environment, Cameron Barnes, a gay Manhattan-via-Memphis landscape designer suffering from AIDS, has moved upstate to Stone Hollow, the stomping ground of various rednecks, good ol' boys, and gays fleeing the metropolis, in order to relieve himself of the "neighborhoods too haunted with the ghosts of the dead" and live out a peaceful, loveless existence. His companion and lover, Dan, has recently left. Max, his best friend since Oberlin, is unwilling to let Cameron sink slothfully into hermitage, and though busying himself with a run for Mayor, takes time to set Cameron up with an HIV-positive graphic designer and to ridicule, passively, Cameron's emotionally fatigued existence. Enter Jesse and Kyle Vanderhof, two brothers from the backwoods who've recently lost their father to liver cancer. Taking over Pop's construction business, the two are hired on by Cameron to fix up a back shed. After an initial mix of stereotypical gay-bashing, racism, and redneck cartooning, Kyle and Jesse become rather lyrical and intimately drawn characters. Kyle is unruly, vindictive and conniving, while Jesse has a quiet and confused resentfulness-and it's Jesse whose thoughts are followed closely. Cameron is intrigued by Jesse, who vacillates between parroting his brother's thickheaded views and acting, with uneasy sensitivity, according to his own discoveries. At first, Russell (The Coming Storm, 1999, etc.) has difficulty reaching the high note of Cameron's cultured dialogue and then shifting to the boys' tough vernacular, but this disconnect eventually smoothes itself out. After milking several advanceson their construction project, Kyle convinces Jesse that they may be able to make a profit off Cameron's apparent intrigue with Jesse. Jesse agrees-but for his own clandestine purpose. Thematically in tow with Russell's previous five efforts (cosmopolitan male meets boy from sticks; bad things happen), this coming-of-age/end-of-life story discovers its own distinction through precise writing (mostly) and memorable people. Bittersweet and worthwhile.
