Blackouts by Justin Torres

I liked but did not love this book--what is great about it is the use of multiple forms of media to emphasize specific points about gay culture, censorship, and the acts of suppression that lead to misunderstanding and forgetting. There is, as one review I read pointed out, a little bit of The Kiss of the Spiderwoman about it, in the most appealing sense of storytelling that book evokes. The framework of the story is this: a nameless young man and his elderly, dying companion, Juan Gay, recount memories and stories of other people as if they were movies. Our narrator and Juan met years ago in an asylum; now the narrator is Juan’s companion through his last days in a ramshackle building called The Palace, somewhere in a western desert. The narrator spins tales of his family and his experiences as a hustler, a partner in older men’s sexual fantasies. Juan tells of his relationship with a lesbian couple, Zhenya and Jan Gay. He was a lost eight-year-old boy when Zhenya found him and used him as the model for drawings for the children’s books she and her partner created. The couple accompanied Juan on the long journey from Puerto Rico where he would live with relatives. They were so important to him that he took their name. Throughout the book, it is impossible to delineate between fact and fiction, but suffice it to say that while the book begins with a blackout following a loss of consciousness, the real backing out is every and all attempts to conceal and erase gay stories and gay culture. This won the National Book Award in 2023, do the cutting edge style was rewarded with recognition.