Must you remember?

“Do you ever imagine stories to yourself so that you forget where you are?” The narrator of Justin Torres’s second novel, a laconic fable about the need to forget and the will to remember, finds this question in a psychological test and cuts it out. It could easily be the epigraph of the novel at large, in which stories accumulate like the fragments of a riddling collage.

For much of the book two characters – a nameless young man (the narrator) and an old man called Juan Gay – are alone together in a room. The narrator first met Juan years earlier, when he was eighteen and staying in a psychiatric unit, and he has come to find Juan – and to care for him as he dies – in a desolate institutional building, “the Palace”, on the edge of the southwestern desert. The narrator has suffered, we come to learn, from debilitating blackouts, or ataques, that may – or may not – have a cultural (specifically, Puerto Rican) derivation. Each character talks about his own life and those of others – partly to forget and partly to excavate himself. “In the Palace”, the narrator observes, “it had come to feel as if life itself might be misplaced.”

The semblance of a story builds tentatively. The Puerto Rican Juan Gay is like a figure in silhouette, heard more than seen – a pensive, mirthful presence rather than an active character. The dialogue between Juan and the narrator is the book’s main act, out of which other tales spiral. Their exchanges have the feel of a modern-day Platonic dialogue – ingenuous, archly wise, erotic. Youth and old age spar affectionately, swapping roles. Among their shared fixations is the story of Jan Gay, a real-life lesbian activist and researcher whom Torres folds into the fictional fabric of Blackouts, imagining her to have transiently “adopted” Juan when he was a young boy.

Torres conjures dialogue and incident with crisp brevity. No single episode or exchange is longer than a few pages. The novel takes shape out of strobelike flashes and, while these brim with feeling – whether humour or nostalgia or quiet outrage – one longs at times for a more sustained sequence. Still, the sense of syncope (of an interceding blank, like a cinematic fade) has an unassailable thematic logic. The exchanges between the narrator and Juan, in particular, acquire the floating, fitful quality of a dialogue of the mind with itself. Is this a memory or present-tense reality? A dream? And how far is the narrator a fictional double of the author? Torres confronts – perhaps deflects – these questions in a postscript: “I never tried to tell the truth on anyone”.

The two main characters are ventriloquial, channelling each other, their voices occasionally hard to distinguish. Torres’s authorial presence, too, is palpable without being intrusive. Images punctuate the text – found photographs that lift us from the interlayered realities of the novel in the manner of diagrams or signposts, albeit with none of the same explicatory force. Many are heavily redacted pages from Sex Variants: A study of homosexual patterns (1941), the surviving portions of this collection of medical case studies forming their own elliptical – and gently humorous – poems of sexual compulsion. The redacted volume is depicted within the narrative. It is the book to which Jan Gay contributed – or surrendered – much of her pioneering research into sexual difference, and Juan (the custodian of her story) is the owner of the blacked-out copy.

“Juan had taught me to laugh at the past”, the narrator admits, “to laugh at my own tendency toward pathos. He modelled a kind of droll humor for me.” Blackouts is able both to inhabit and to break out of the solemn-sincere register that characterizes much gay fiction – to meander freely in tone and mood. The characters tease each other and themselves, just as the book undercuts (without undoing) its own gravity. “Darling, the only thing anyone should be embarrassed about is taking themselves too seriously”, Juan quips in one of his more Wildean moments. “Anyway, isn’t that what mystery is? Your blackouts, these erasures? Frustration as art?”

Hamlet’s pained demand, “Must I remember?”, is ever-present beneath the minimalist verbal surface, as are numerous other literary and artistic revenants. (Endnotes make many of these explicit). But Justin Torres’s prose remains free of showy erudition. This may have something to do with the character of the narrator – an ingénue and an initiate. “And my, what dumb guile I have”, he says with fairy-tale archness in the final scene – a parody of Narcissus meeting his reflection. It is the strongest, strangest moment in a novel that excels at emblematic concision.

James Cahill’s first novel, Tiepolo Blue, was published in 2022

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