Martin and John

“It’s an amazing feat for any writer, in particular a male writer, to expose so nakedly the need for closeness with a father that lies underneath a son’s rage … In this short book, Dale Peck has managed to pack the density and the depth of a human life. He is a brave and very talented writer.”

—
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

“Like the columns describing a medieval cloister—each different, all similar—Dale Peck’s couples may be rich or poor, sophisticated or provincial, but they all know something about homophobia, violence, incest, and the anguish of dying an early death.”

—Edmund White, author of
A Boy’s Own Story

“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’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
Guide

“
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

“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 … An exciting first novel by a 24-year-old author.”

—Library Journal

“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 … 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.”

—Publishers Weekly

Greenville

Body Surfing

Gospel Harmonies

Martin and John

The Law of Enclosures

Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye

The Garden of Lost and Found

Nonfiction

Hatchet Jobs

Visions and Revisions

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction

Drift House

The Lost Cities

Sprout

I DIDN’T SET out to write this book. I didn’t set out to write a book at all, at least not this one. I was working on another novel entirely as my college senior thesis. My advisor on that project was also the teacher in the fiction workshops I was taking to complete my writing minor, and he told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t going to be submitting chapters from my thesis in his workshops. And so, while I churned out the requisite coming of age/coming out novel, I began writing a series of stories on the side, stories in which I drew on gay archetypes I’d encountered in books, plays, movies, and the news to create a collage of gay life in the late 1980s. The stories were topical but also unreal. I was a twenty-one-year-old college student, after all, with only borrowed knowledge of the lives I was describing. I wasn’t a hustler or a victim, let alone daddy or dandy, john or queen. I didn’t have AIDS and didn’t know anyone who did. Hell, I’d only had sex one time, an experience that could be described as perfunctory at best.

The stories that grew from this infertile soil sprang up in the margins of my brain while I worked on my “real” novel and waited for “real” life to start. I had no plan when I sat down to write the first, “Always and Forever,” and it wasn’t until I began a second (which didn’t make the final cut) that I hit on the conceit of reusing the names. Even that was an accident. I’d always had a hard time coming up with names for characters. I borrowed friends’ names, or scanned my bookshelves and pulled character or author names more or less at random: Martin came from Martin Luther King, Jr. (
Why We Can’t Wait
), John from a boy I had a crush on, Henry from Henry James (“The Pupil,” “The Real Thing”), Beatrice from Dante’s
Inferno.
Susan was the name of the last girl I ever made out with, and it was in her room that I began the second story. There were two books visible on her bookshelves: a biography of Jim Morrison and a book of his lyrics. I couldn’t stand The Doors and refused to acknowledge them, and I plugged along with an ever-growing cast of nameless characters, until finally the unsignified array of “he”s and “him”s and “she”s and “her”s grew too unwieldy and I borrowed from myself. “Always and Forever,” though only a month old, already felt like ancient history, yet even as I assigned its names to a set of new characters I could see the similarities between the two casts, especially its leads: an innocent boy, an experienced man, a desire that’s both mutual and exploitative, and grows in a world where women are cogs in men’s lives, necessary but almost invisible (“Blue Wet-Paint Columns,” the last story I wrote for the book, was an attempt to acknowledge that).

By the time I left Sue’s room I’d lost interest in the story but had begun to glimpse the shape of a larger project, one in which my inexperience could be generative rather than limiting. The desire to mix up my characters’ attributes and reassign them to different contexts was invigorating. “Transformations” was the first conscious attempt at what I was already calling “a Martin and John story,” and after that they rolled out of me at the rate of one or two a month. Still, they remained tangential to the novel I was working on, a game I was playing, an assignment I had to fulfill, and I didn’t take the time to wonder if there was anything more to them until after I’d turned in my thesis and realized
now I had to write another book.
I was terrified. I had no clue how to turn these stories into a book and no idea what else I might work on, and so, more by default than anything else, I kept churning out material in that first summer after college (“The Search for Water,” “Three Night Watchmen”) and as a first-year MFA student (“Driftwood,” “The Gilded Theater”). But the stories came more and more slowly as I realized I’d exhausted the possibilities of the conceit, or at any rate my ability to exploit it. By then I had a mess of a dozen stories, none of which was really finished, and no idea how to put them together. It was my friend Bruce who saved me, and saved the book. He suggested I try my hand at what were then called short shorts, and which later acquired the sexier name flash fiction. “Given This and Everything” was the result, then “Circumnavigation,” my first attempt at writing about AIDS, which in turn gave me the courage to write “Fucking Martin.” The short form was liberating to me, whose stories have always erred on the longish side (of the twenty or twenty-five short stories I’ve finished, probably two-thirds are 7,200 words long, plus or minus a thousand words). I liked the counterpoint of the longs and the shorts, although I still hadn’t hit on the (let’s face it) pretty simple idea of alternating them. When my agent began sending out the unfinished manuscript in 1991, the short shorts were still clumped together at the top of the pile, and it was only after I’d read them through that I realized they felt like a single narrative. In fact the editor who eventually bought the manuscript preferred them that way, and I had to convince him they’d make a more shapely book if they were spaced throughout. (“Let’s use italics!”) I remember dropping the term “frame narrative,” not because I’d conceived of the short shorts as a frame narrative but because “frame narrative” sounded intentional, intelligent. The truth is, I was so unsure of the strategy that I didn’t actually read the book in its final form until it was in galleys.