The end of the Cold War has allowed for a particular niche of historical fiction, transnational novels whose gay male protagonists live out their coming of age against a backdrop of national struggles for freedom and renewal. In Caleb Crain’s “Necessary Errors” (2013), Jacob Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate, heads to Prague in 1990 with a “wish to follow history” just after the Velvet Revolution. Although only tentatively out, he feels sexually ahead of the local historical curve: “It occurred to Jacob that he might not have arrived too late for the liberation of Eastern Europe’s gay people.” Tomasz Jedrowski’s “Swimming in the Dark” (2020) runs in the reverse East-West direction, telling the story of a Polish student, Ludwik, who flees Warsaw for New York before the Solidarity movement is crushed by martial law. In his native country, Ludwik had been in love with Janusz, a go-along apparatchik who was happy, even from the down-low, to cling to the Party line: “Having oranges and bananas every month of the year—is that freedom to you?”
The newest addition to this subgenre is Thomas Grattan’s “The Recent East” (MCD), a sharply accomplished first novel by a forty-seven-year-old author who up to now has published just a scattering of quietly daring short stories. Set for the most part in the suddenly former German Democratic Republic, Grattan’s book inserts its barely teen-age American protagonist, Michael Sullivan, into the awkward reconciliation between the two Germanys. But, compared with Crain and Jedrowski, Grattan has written a very different sort of historical fiction. If Crain’s Jacob seeks to sojourn in history as deliberately as Thoreau moves to the woods outside Concord, and Jedrowski’s Ludwik experiences history in the manner of Stephen Dedalus, as the nightmare from which he is trying to awake, Grattan’s Michael lives through Germany’s historic decommunization as a kind of incidental improvement to be occasionally engaged with—or, more frequently, ignored. “The Recent East” gives an excellent sense of its chosen then and there, but this is historical fiction in which history remains secondary to personality, where national reunification is less important than the characters’ attempts to make their own stressed-out psychologies cohere.
We meet skinny, thirteen-year-old Michael in a small town in upstate New York, where he’s living with his mother and his sister, Adela, after their father abandons the family. The siblings—Adela is younger but acts older—have a well-developed “system” of symbiosis: Michael repays Adela’s protectiveness with his humor and imagination. They call their mother, Beate, “the German Lady,” because she’s the child of academics who fled the G.D.R. in 1968 and never really adjusted to life in America. Not long after the demolition of the Berlin Wall, Beate unexpectedly inherits her parents’ old home in the fictional town of Kritzhagen, near the Baltic Sea. Still wan after her husband’s desertion, she tapes photographs of the imposing house to the fridge in New York, allowing what had been East Germany to tantalize her family as an unlikely step up.
The house turns out to be a wreck, without electricity and full of mice, yet Kritzhagen becomes the making of Michael. When not introducing himself to drink and drugs and the joys of petty vandalism, he kills the rodents and fills his new home with scavenged furniture: “This city tugged self-sufficiency out of Michael, like a magician pulling an endless scarf from his mouth.” Delighted by his new friends, who are also stumbling through a degree of freedom they never anticipated, he quickly accepts himself as schwul, even after the bout of H.I.V. panic he experiences from being fucked without a condom by a boy called Maxi Pad.
Grattan’s short stories have been especially adept at rendering the emotional and physical gropings of adolescent gay boys, whose gestures of affection often get lost in aggressive disguises. The fifteen-year-old in “General Helper,” for example, seems to lose a “feeling of dread” only when being bruised or cut by the son of the chemotherapy patient his mother attends to. “I still love a hard-to-crack person,” the narrator says from some future time, when his sexual imagination remains governed by what happened early on. Grattan doesn’t stage the Grand Guignols of a Dennis Cooper, but he isn’t afraid to “go there” in his non-exclamatory, even deadpan, pages, to push his characters through baffled, believable gross-outs of self-assertion and self-punishment.
The German Lady is especially well evoked by Grattan in several phases of her life. Geopolitics have left Beate twice bewildered, first through defection and then through repatriation. She mostly sleeps away her early days back in Kritzhagen; venturing outside, she can only hope that her lack of recognition will be magically repaired when, say, “in the midst of getting on a bus . . . the landscape in front of her unlocked and she remembered everything.” She finds unexpected fellowship and a job giving haircuts at a local bar that she doesn’t realize was a longtime hangout for Stasi agents. Taken in hand by her cousin Liesl, whose fortunes begin a capitalist ascent through an enterprising new husband, Beate at last finds her feet. She takes a position at a nursing home and even embarks on an affair with “balding, hefty Josef.” Still, her fearfulness abides, something as constitutional as it has been circumstantial. She has even wondered “if it was normal to be afraid of one’s children.”
As her son and daughter move through their youth, Beate notices their growing estrangement from each other: “Adela scoured the newspaper. She spewed out information about Bosnia and Sudan and women sold into sex slavery. Michael told stories about his art teacher who opened the windows in winter to remind them that suffering was part of art.” What’s more troublesome is that both of them seem, in different ways, to be in love with Liesl’s son, the hulking and sheltering Udo, who gets the electricity turned on; who (though not gay himself) tenderly supports Michael as he sweats out his H.I.V. test results; and who shields Beate from skinheads. But then, out of some dark impulse—probably more self-hating than politically savage—he takes part in an attack on a local camp for Roma refugees from the Balkan wars, while Michael stands by holding a rock. Caught in the act by Adela, Udo looks at her with “the scared regret of a scolded dog.” Deciding that he is irredeemable, she hastens her departure for California, where her father is remarrying, and doesn’t return to Germany for seventeen years.
Michael appears “mortified” by his presence at the assault, but, as he floats through all his promiscuous affections and couplings, he remains close to Udo, riding his shoulders in a gay-pride parade and, as the years go by, even calling him Big Husband. Udo, who can never let go of the idea that he may indeed be a “monster,” eventually finds a way to die out on the ocean.
By the time Udo is gone, Michael is in his early thirties, the owner of a kitsch-Communist theme bar in Kritzhagen. On Phone Tap Friday, “anyone willing would write down a secret they’d once shared over the phone, the thing they would have been most ashamed for the Stasi to have heard.” Michael himself has always “loved actions that wiped thinking clean,” and his grief over Udo turns sex into a compulsive, exhausting palliative: “Even as his body began to rebel, coming taking almost an hour, the collar of his foreskin holiday-red, he pushed forward.” He texts his dead friend’s phone, smears Udo’s cremated remains on his face, and tries to keep at bay the fear that there had been something elementally dark and broken in Udo all along.
Udo remains the book’s central mystery, and it is an indication of Grattan’s skill, not a limitation, that his character never really adds up. Was his participation in the attack some wayward, subconscious release of furies built up but suppressed through decades of totalitarianism? The novelist cannot say, because, finally, he doesn’t know. Part of realism is the acceptance of mystery, especially when it involves human nature. If Adela’s moral erasure of Udo is understandable, Grattan’s sticking with him is nervy, even fearless.
Grattan’s story stretches almost to the present day, but its shuffled chronology makes us feel that we never really leave any of the decades to which the author keeps returning. He even has a nice technique, sparingly used, by which a character’s projections of the future get rendered in the past tense. His command of his story’s intricate continuities, something rarer in a novelist than readers often realize, may signal how long and deeply he has been imagining the book. It seems to have some autobiographical origins: the author’s mother was indeed a young defector, and he’s acknowledged upstate New York and Germany as “places where I’ve spent a lot of time.” But the book never engenders the airless, autofictive feeling that the writer is the story rather than its teller.
Historical fiction is often beset with a knowingness, a smug hindsight that the best writing of actual historians, who don’t seek to tame their material into emblematic stories, manages to avoid. Grattan’s general lightness of touch seems to derive from a lack of obligation; he senses instead that his job is to represent the figures he sets in motion, and that they in turn have no duty to be representative of anything beyond themselves. Moments that might have become frantic have an economy and a calm supported by a plain, sturdy syntax usefully at odds with the ambivalence of the novel’s characters. The book has a couple of low-energy phases, but Grattan more typically knows how to truncate scenes before they overstay their payoff; a concise, bravura paragraph presents a wedding toast full of barely concealed hostility. Descriptive effects never come across as flourishes or grace notes. They get things done, fast and vividly: an old village’s “structures clustered together like gossips”; a schoolgirl’s summertime boredom leaves “each free day a rocket ship she couldn’t consider how to build.” The book steers clear of vogue phrasing and literary fiction’s tendency toward A-student, look-at-me “craft.”
Crain’s “Necessary Errors,” written with considerable elegance, was full of meticulous observation that will insure its documentary value as years pass, but it is a book to be remembered for its milieu, not for its people. Grattan’s rarer achievement is to have written a historical novel whose when and where, however well established, are not really determinative, and whose people remain individual riddles instead of political integers. The varieties of personal, internal fear—Beate’s, Michael’s, Adela’s, Udo’s—coalesce into what may be the real subject of the book: how, regardless of citizenship, we are all a police state when it comes to ourselves.
“The Recent East” offers its own sense of history’s repetitions and rhymes—in the last pages, Syrians succeed Roma as refugees—along with its mashups. Maybe all history, one begins to think, is drunk history, as it becomes when the young Michael, returning home at 4 a.m., says to his sister, “It’s always the quiet ones. Like John Wilkes Booth and Jodie Foster.” For an American living in the present hour, there’s little instruction or consolation to be had from this novel or the others in its specialized cohort. All of them have been turned into tragedies by subsequently squandered American possibility. Crain’s Jacob sees the Gulf War turning the globe into just “a setting where America was the principal actor.” Jedrowski’s Ludwik wrote to his lost love from “the dreadful safety” of the United States; tumult was something that occurred elsewhere. But the healthful sea change from which these books took life has dried up into near-nothingness, as America—bereft of agency, safety, and standing—now seeks not to free the world but only, humbly, to rejoin it. Fiction, as always, will have to play catch-up, which is what Thomas Grattan’s career now seems splendidly to be doing. ♦
