Book Review

There must be something in the natural born writer that having mastered literary form urges them to take on every other literary genre. Raymond Luczak, who has found successes as a playwright, editor, poet, essayist and autobiographer has now turned his hand to the novel. Men with Their Hands (Rebel Satori Press, 2009) is Luczak's first extended attempt at fiction.

Book covers, as every reader knows, are there for other reasons than to simply protect the book. The front cover Luczak's new book uses a series of images of hands spelling out the title using finger spelling. Above them read the words " First Place Winner of the Project of the Project: Queerlit 2006 Contest. "The blurb on the back a gloss beginning" Growing up different is never easyfind next; and ending "his story will open your hearts to what it means to be different in an indifferent world" could be describing anyone from Hamlet to Holden Caulfield. Bright orange covers are tough to ignore, but whether entering from political stage right or stage left, the reader's best bet – and the fairest thing to the novel - is probably just to tear off the cover and enter the book straight on.

Like most writers, Luczak is found of sectioning off his books and Men with Their Hands is separated into four parts. Section one is the third person narrative of Michael, a small town boy, beginning at twelve years old in 1978 and taking him to 1983 when he has graduated from high school and leaves for college at NYU in New York. Each chapter provides a vignette from a year in one of those lives.

The second section of the book covers the same years (1978-83) in the gay community in Greenwich Village. Like section one,it is divided into vignette's but this time each around a different central character. The first vignette is told in the first person by Eddie who joins a dinner in which the reader is introduced to a number of Eddie's friends. From there on the reader is in for a bit of funhouse mirrors narrative. The vignette still in the first person, focuses on a relationship with a character named Neil. The narrator is still presumably Eddie, though there are no real clues at this point as to whether that is true or not. The subsequent vignette shift to third person and a character named Lee. Is this still Eddie talking? The next three vignettes are also third person, but then we shift back into first person again. It isn't Eddie, now, though, it is a character named Rex. The section closes with the first person narrative of Vince, a man dying of aids who had been the central figure of the group introduced to us at the beginning of the section.

Section three weaves the lives of Michael and the New York Community. It begins with the parallel Thanksgivings of Michael who is about to leave his small town to come to New York to and Eddie, whose group has fragmented after the death of Vince. By the end of the section Michael has found his way into Eddie's community. This last vignette throws the reader one more curve in that it makes the unusual move of telling the story in the second person. This is a pretty risky strategy. It worked well or Jim Grimsley in Winter Birds, because he was able to establish that connection from the start. Is the reader after having jump from place to place and person to person, ready to take on Michael's persona?

The fourth section, "Coda", jumps to 2003. Michael has now become a success, but his partner of seventeen years has died. He looks back over the years of his life with Stan and tries to work out how he will continue on and develop future relationships. This final section is aptly named. It is all of a piece and, while wrapping up lose ends, seems almost peripheral to the main part of the book.

Readers of AssemblyRequired, Luczak's memoir of 2009 will quickly spot what is going on here and what is going on here is a metaphor for disability writing in general. Both protagonists are small town boys, whose difficulty hearing and manner of speaking make them feel alienated from their families and from the community in general. Both love music and become increasingly aware they are attracted to member of their own sex rather than to women. Neither feels any sense of community nor really knows ASL until going away to college in a big city – Luczak to Gallaudet and Michael to NYU. The physical descriptions of both, too, are remarkably similar.

As Aristotle pointed out many centuries ago, life is not art. Whether or not one accepts Aritstotle's thesis that the tedium of daily life is not sufficient to make a compelling narrative, his point is still relevant. By in large, the overwhelming entry level genre for writers in the field of disability literature is life writing, and, with the exception of Anne Finger, it is difficult to think of a writer whose fiction preceded their autobiography. How does one make that transition from what seems to come almost naturally to most people – telling their own story – to becoming a writer of fiction. This is an important question because there is remarkably little fiction, either novels or short stories, being written by about people with disabilities.

Luczak, of course, is a skilled playwright, but that does not erase some of the issues that his novel presents nor some of the observations that a reader is likely to make about them., one of which is that, as that as the coda suggests, he sticks to close to his original material. Should Luczak have written a novel? Undoubtedly. Disability literature is in real need of writers who will risk leaping out of their comfort zone to write fiction. Should he have written this novel? That is another question. Only by reading both Assembly Required and Men with Their Hands and deciding whether the novel provides anything that the novel does not can that judgment be made.

One service that the novel does provide is to give readers unfamiliar with American Sign Language some sense of how it works. In the author's note Luczak writes:

American sign language (ASL) dialogue is conveyed as is to give the signing-impaired reader a flavor of how different a language ASL is in grammar and syntax from English. By placing such dialogue in context, I hope I have kept them clear and accessible.”

Luczak is taking a bit of a risk here because the reader unfamiliar with ASL is likely to balk a bit with dialogue like the following:

When I return, I sense a charge between Neil and Frieda, who is smiling slightly. He says, "See-you drive Sunday, o-k? "
When he is gone, Frieda smiles even more. "Me-ask-him finish."
"What ask what?"
"Remember-remember me-bet him faggot?"
I couldn't believe it. I had to sit down. "Really?"
She nods. "He-think- discuss-discuss Sunday good idea. "

Clearly, this is does not have the sound of everyday English dialogue. Rather like encountering a French speaker in an American novel, readers are like to feel a bit uncomfortable with their own ignorance. Forcing a reader to acknowledge his or her own parochialism, however, is " not a literary faux pas. As readers make their way through the book, they do gain some understanding of just how syntactically and grammatically different ASL, just as Luczak hopes.

As in all his work, Luczak is writing about a community that receives very little literary attention, the Deaf gay community. Near the end of the novel, Michael confronts Ted a hard of hearing professor at NYU "with ambivalent feelings about the deaf community”" .

He points to his implant.
"Oh, so you want me to make love to that?"
"I'm part of the future. You're not."
I am shocked by his broad generalization."Ted, you're a professor of vocational rehabilitation, right? What happens when an unique culture like mine disappears?"
"New ones pup up and take its place."
"Now that's what I call a true tragedy."
"What do you mean?"
"My hands." I look at him straight in the eye. "They're the most beautiful things in the world. Why replace them if they have such heartbreaking beauty? People like you want people like me to remain second-class citizens with a very expensive and irreversible surgical procedure that doesn't always work. You know as well as I do that we've fought so hard to become first class-citizens."
"That's why I did this."

Though the final words are Ted's, they could be Luczak's. The recording and preservation of a culture that is threatened both by AIDS and new technology like cochlear implants is the main impetus for his novel. Its is a culture that sometimes shimmers in a glitz of sex, appearances and food, but a culture nonetheless, and Men with Their Hands is a voyage in.