Soon after the big game, Kayden was slain by a boy who’d been forced, at age 12, to perform fellatio on an older cousin to get into that cousin’s gang. What they will find is the ghost of the murdered Kayden Kelliher, yet another storied athlete from Marion’s high school who led the basketball team to a state championship. (This is one of the similes that fell flat for me.) But in this era of #MeToo, readers may search in a novel like this - filled with off-putting characters - for the tiniest glint of awareness or redemption.
Maybe This Town Sleeps aspires to be a book without sympathy: an unflinching look at the pain of reservation life, where spirits occasionally haunt characters like chlamydia of the throat.
But when Marion considers intervening on Shannon’s behalf, the elders he confides in - his mother and stepfather - tell him to mind his own business.
Shannon is also apparently being raped by his roommate, another former jock. Naturally, Shannon wants nothing beyond these secretive late-night hookups with Marion in the dark corners of Geshig. Marion soon has a tryst with white Shannon, a closeted former classmate and star jock not at all comfortable with his own sexuality. As much as Marion wants to stay away from Geshig, he keeps getting pulled back - just as he does to the men-seeking-men websites he obsessively visits. There is a story worth telling somewhere in This Town Sleeps, but it gets lost amid endless hookups between unlikable characters and a narrative arc that resembles the trajectory of the ball in a game of frat-house Beer Pong played by freshmen pledges one errant bounce away from puking into a nearby potted palm.Īfter starting with the murder of a teenage basketball star - a crime couched in echoes of a Native American warrior past - the story picks up with Marion, an openly gay twentysomething Ojibwe man from Geshig, a small town on a Minnesota reservation where the killing took place. But when sex and similes miss the mark? The results are, well, flaccid.
Props again to the author for crafting similes uniquely his own. Staples for attempting to portray copious carnal congress in This Town Sleeps.Īnother difficulty in writing about coitus is trying to invent phrases that capture the appropriate imagery without falling into cliché. As evidence of this difficulty, there is even an annual award for Bad Sex in Fiction presented by the British magazine Literary Review. There’s a fine line between titillating and nauseating.
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