Blackouts

Reading & Discussion with Justin Torres, Los Angeles (UCLA) | Part of the event series "American Rodeo"

Far out in the desert, at an enigmatic refuge called “Palace,” a young man in Justin Torres’ National Book Award-winning novel cares for a dying soul. He cares for someone he once briefly met, but who repeatedly haunts the outermost edges of his life: Juan Gay. Juan desperately wants Nene – his caregiver’s nickname – to rediscover a long-lost, legendary study: “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.” It contains accounts collected in the early 20th century by queer researcher Jan Gay – whose groundbreaking work, however, was hijacked by a committee and her name erased. As Juan awaits his end, he and Nene tell each other stories of joy and sorrow; they resurrect loves and lives, mothers and fathers, heroes and anti-heroes. “Blackouts” is a glowing collage – of tender, fragmentary dialogues, surreal photographs, blackened manuscript pages. Torres succeeds in creating a radical antidote to America’s collective amnesia – a literary obelisk of memory and silence, whose strength lies in its incompleteness.