Gordon, the 24-year-old antihero of Thomas Grattan’s queer coming-of-age novel In Tongues, craves attention the way Wall Street traders crave cocaine: with a slick kind of desperation and the certainty that he can always get more. He’s a cocky glutton. Grattan frames this — correctly — not as a personal shortcoming of Gordon’s but, by detailing the delicate rules and potent temptations of his social world, as an occupational hazard of being a gay man in your 20s.
It’s 2001 (a setting that allows Grattan to avoid the tropes that plague gay literature: there’s no inevitable link between death and desire and, thank god, the word “Grindr” doesn’t appear) and Gordon is a college dropout waiting tables at a mall restaurant in Minnesota. He makes big life decisions by shrugging. His provincial parents don’t do much for him: His father is a born-again Christian whose conditional love for his gay son will always play second to his writhing, down-on-your-knees devotion to the Lord. His mother treats him with the same aggrieved tepidness she uses to answer calls in her job as a telephone operator.
Gordon’s self-pity serves as a hall pass for his entitlement: when his boyfriend, Alan, breaks up with him, he feels so hurt that he decides he has the right to steal $200 from Alan’s drawer. He sells his car and buys a bus ticket to New York City, where he sleeps on an inoperative pull-out couch and stocks shelves at the grocery store across the street.
The store’s neon sign “pulses against my apartment’s walls in a way that sometimes reminded me of the ocean, other times of electrocution.” We understand, from Grattan’s snappy prose, how Gordon swings wildly from romance to despair — this, too, is one of the mixed blessings of being 24.
Gordon arrives in New York unaware of his charms. Then, one night, at a dive bar full of “young people with grubby clothes and perfect teeth,” he befriends Janice, a lesbian as tough as she is maternal, under whose attention Gordon blossoms. Janice teaches Gordon the art of looking and being looked at.
“When men look at you, you need to look back,” she instructs Gordon, handing him a cigarette. She encourages him to buy a Speedo and introduces him to the knowledge of his good looks, which he would have been better off without.
Gordon ends up being less Adonis than Narcissus, interested in people only to the extent that they can provide him with a reflection of himself. Of Janice, he says, “What I wanted most was an understanding of how she saw me.” Of another friend, he declares, “all I could consider was what he thought of me.” With no intrinsic sense of self, Gordon expects other people to supply him with one. And, because he’s pretty, the self-image he gets is flattering, if inaccurate.
As ambition and desire for validation awaken in Gordon, he begins to social-climb, clumsily, in his unfashionable clothes and with his corny jokes. (When he meets someone named Francisco, he asks if he can call him “San Francisco.”) Janice’s girlfriend gets him a job walking the dogs of Manhattan’s ultrawealthy, a job he promptly quits when he meets Philip and Nicola, an older gay couple who own a premier art gallery and offer him a job as their personal assistant.
Gordon lies to Janice, saying it pays a lot more, but really he takes the job because it provides him access to an elusive, shimmering social sphere. Gordon is taken to mansions upstate, five-star hotels in Europe, and parties where people in designer clothing down goblets of fine wine and toss off opinions about art and politics with the indifference of ordering off the dollar menu.
Philip and Nicola are captivated by Gordon’s youthful beauty; they live vicariously through his sexual escapades but reserve the right to judge him if he sleeps with the wrong person or flirts in too lecherous a way. When Philip introduces him to some of the gallery’s clients, he scolds Gordon: “You don’t need to lie down for every man who gives you his attention.” Gordon begins to understand the delicate balance required of the world he’s entered. “Philip wanted me to flirt,” he says. “Also to pretend that I wasn’t doing so, my failure at pretending what he found distasteful.”
Gordon believes that attention from elite people will elevate him to their ranks — that a look from the right rich person is something like a safety net made from Hermès scarves. But youth and beauty are flimsy, compromised forms of power, which can be levied against you just as readily as they can be levied by you. They don’t promise real security, can’t be cashed in. Reading In Tongues, I was reminded at its every snaking turn of a line by the critic Cat Zhang: “It is brutal to realize, when you’re young, that the ogling curiosity with which older people regard you is not the same as respect, and getting attention does not mean having real agency.”
In a turn reminiscent of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gordon becomes the muse for a wunderkind painter, Pavel. Gordon becomes hooked on Pavel, if only because of the way Pavel “dangles his attention in front of me only to yank it away.” Pavel looks at Gordon not with the immediacy of a lover’s lust but with Kantian disinterested pleasure — always at a remove, a paintbrush, canvas, and studio’s expanse between them.
When Nicola compliments Pavel’s paintings of Gordon, Gordon thanks him. “You didn’t paint them!” Nicola chides him. I couldn’t help but root for Gordon and his childish presumption. Why is it chutzpah to claim ownership of your own image?
Muses never get their due. Da Vinci is the genius behind the Mona Lisa. But, if given the choice, I’d rather meet the vision herself.
Twenty-Something
The event: A talk with Thomas Grattan, author of In Tongues
The time: Friday, Aug. 2, 4 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Bookshop, 229 Commercial St.
The cost: Free
