Nigel Watts. WE ALL LIVE IN A HOUSE CALLED INNOCENCE (Sceptre, #5.99).
* ''SOMETIMES I wish I could take my brain out and stamp on it,'' says
James, the protagonist of this terrifically honest book, and for the
first few chapters the reader's response is Yo! Go for it! James is a
sexist pig of the creepiest kind; he resents and fears women and can
hardly look at gays, and his hobby is self-loathing.
All us guys know James. We went to school with him. He works beside us
and stands beside us in the Gents. This James lives in all of us, in the
little corner of the soul that knows that sex is a shaky idea and
deviance is bad news.
But when James meets Tad (short for tadpole), a wheelchair-bound gay
writer, his life changes utterly. A terrible beauty is born when he
starts to like himself, women, and gays, and not in any particular
order. James works in a library, but it is not Conan the Librarian we
see develop, rather Conan the Fully Rounded Human Being. Pornography
becomes eroticism and hate becomes love, all embedded in elegant and
complex prose that lays bare the nature of male insecurity and its
allied game-playing. -- I. B.
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