Publishers Weekly
08/07/2023
Torres’s ambitious sophomore outing (following We the Animals) intersperses a fictional biography of early 20th-century sex researcher Jan Gay with an enticing if murky present-day narrative. The unnamed 20-something narrator visits a dying man named Juan, whom he first met at 17, when they were patients at a psychiatric hospital. Now, after having accidentally flooded his apartment, the narrator moves into Juan’s rundown building (inhabited, in Juan’s words, by a “badling of queer ducks”) and promises to carry out Juan’s unfinished project involving a research study published in 1941—Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns by George W. Henry—that draws on Gay’s research. Juan’s copy of the book is heavily redacted, leaving “little poems of illumination... a counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr. Henry’s agenda,” to de-pathologize Henry’s case studies and restore the egalitarian spirit of Gay’s groundwork. Juan and the narrator’s dialogues can feel contrived, but just as the Sex Variants erasure poems sparkle with possibility, so too does Torres make fruitful use of references to literature and art, including a Carl Van Vechten photo of a famous gay male ballet dancer and a children’s book by Gay’s partner Zhenya, the latter of which proves to contain deliciously queer subtext. At its best, this captures the spirit of Torres’s pangs of inspiration. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Sweeping, ingenious . . . A kiss to build a dream on.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“An extraordinary achievement . . . A perfect book.”
—Bill Goldstein, Weekend Today in New York
“Torres swings for the bleachers in Blackouts, a transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations . . . It’s easily 2023’s sexiest novel . . . A tour de force. Run, don't walk, to buy it.”
—Hamilton Cain, Star Tribune
“As ambitious and bold as it is beautifully elegiac, this dynamic novel captures the act of storytelling as though one’s life depends on it . . . An atmospheric, brilliant novel.
—Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe
“The supreme pleasure of [Blackouts] is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality . . . Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on.”
—Hugh Ryan, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Shimmering, fable-like . . . An ingenious assemblage of research, vignette, image and conceit . . . Playful and mysterious, there’s much in it to admire.”
—Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post
“A surreal, expansive, audacious excavation of queer history and identity.”
—David Canfield, Vanity Fair
“A transfixing and emotional examination of history . . . [Blackouts] illuminates the ways in which the lives and experiences of marginalized people have long been omitted from written records.”
—Megan McCluskey, Time
“Artfully blur[s] history, autobiography and fiction . . . Beautiful.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“If you locked Shirley Jackson and David Wojnarowicz in a room together, they might invent the kind of moldering dreamworld that Justin Torres conjures in [Blackouts] . . . [A] glorious book.”
—Beejay Silcox, The Guardian
“An experimental journey into the annals of queer history that is equal parts intergenerational love letter and homoerotic fever dream.”
—Jeremy Childs, Los Angeles Times
“A vital novel about the erasure of queer history.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“A dreamy novel that unfurls among mixed media and Socratic dialogues, moving freely between fact and fiction as it proposes and complicates questions about how history is made.”
—Joshua Barone, The New York Times
“Dazzling . . . Torres has created his own queer history story through the eyes of the narrator learning from Juan through art, poetry, and more. The result is prismatic and beautiful.”
—Sarah Neilson, Shondaland
“A triumph.”
—Christian Paz, Vox
“Each page of Blackouts is like a lens that Torres clicks into place, some of them clarifying your vision, others obscuring it, until, eventually, you can see.”
—Tope Folarin, The Atlantic
“Irresistible . . . [An] ambitious, unruly novel of ideas . . . [and] a deeply moving queer love story.”
—Steven Pfau, Chicago Review of Books
“As demanding and beautifully difficult as it is seductive, disarming, and important.”
—Brontez Purnell, BOMB
“Disorientation is a pleasure in [Blackouts] . . . An earnest project that does not seek to distill settled conclusions from the queer past.”
—Colton Valentine, Bookforum
“Blackouts soars . . . A rare masterpiece.”
—Christopher Bollen, Interview
Kirkus Reviews
2023-08-12
An unnamed narrator and his elderly interlocutor weave together forgotten queer histories in Torres’ second novel, following We the Animals (2011).
When the 20-something narrator wakes up from a blackout to find his kitchen flooded, he drives into the desert to visit Juan, an elderly friend who lives with “a badling of queer ducks” in a housing complex called the Palace. In exchange for a place to stay, the narrator agrees to carry on Juan’s life project, which involves a (real) 1941 research study called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. Though the research was begun in 1935 by Jan Gay, a lesbian anthropologist, the author named in the published study was psychiatrist George W. Henry, who used the text to pathologize homosexuality. Perusing Juan’s copy of the study, the narrator discovers largely blacked-out pages featuring highlighted fragments of text that Juan calls “little poems of illumination,” exercises in erasure that attempt to wrest the text from Dr. Henry and blow life back into the individual testimonies collected by Gay. Scans of the blacked-out pages of Sex Variants, in addition to related photographs and documents from Gay’s fictional archive, punctuate the novel’s short chapters, which capture Juan and the narrator’s conversations. Composed of stories both real and invented, collective and personal—Juan frequently asks the narrator to tell him about his sexual exploits—the novel's interlocutory structure recalls Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. As playful, inventive, and at times kaleidoscopic as the book may be, the dialogue between Juan and the narrator often comes across as forced, with some blocks of storytelling (including the entirety of Torres’ short story “Reverting to a Wild State,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2011) feeling wedged in. The novel shines and surprises, though, in sections where the characters interweave cultural and historical artifacts, as well as memory and literary references, to reconstruct and revise queer history. Here, the novel’s central question about where storytelling ends and history begins comes to the fore, albeit with no clear resolution. It's up to the reader, the narrator concludes, to decide where truth and fiction converge.
An inventive novel that displays the scope of its author’s ambitions.
