PULSES WITH VIVID,
AUTHENTIC SCENES
Review by Diane de la Paz, The Weekly Volcano, Nov. 1, 2007
Some
irresistible people showed up and took over Alec Clayton's mind.
Marty Winters; his wild wife, Maria Perez; his second wife, Selena; their kids;
and some good friends: They come to life in Clayton's third novel.
And beware: They'll burrow into your mind, too.
"The Wives of Marty Winters" opens with a stunning description of the Seattle
Pride Day rally, where we meet Marty and Selena and move with them through a
harrowing scene.
Then it turns far back in time to when Marty found Maria at an Olympia High
School dance.
"The heart senses moments of magic," Clayton writes, putting us amid the
teen-agers as they're swaying beneath a mirror ball.
Maria and Marty "slip off the dance floor ... help themselves to punch and sit
at one of the small tables and watch the aurora borealis cast on walls and
ceilings by that magical glass ball."
So begins a saga about how the past haunts a man and how homophobia affects his
family.
"Wives" is Clayton's heartfelt tale, a book he had to write. In it Marty and
Selena's gay son is attacked and brutally beaten, but he survives, unlike
Clayton's own bisexual son, Bill, who was assaulted in 1995 and committed
suicide a month hence. Bill was 17.
What does Clayton hope to give the readers of his self-published book?
"Compassion," he answers without a pause.
This isn't Clayton's memoir, though. It's a novel he's worked on for two years,
writing, rewriting, taking breaks, coming back.
"I reach a point where the characters are telling me what they're going to do,"
Clayton says. "I think about them while I'm driving, taking a bath, washing
dishes ... ."
A shocking crime is committed within the first few pages of "Wives," and we
don't learn the outcome until the latter half of the book. But this is no
mystery novel. It's an odyssey across the country over a few decades. And it
will ring familiar to readers, Clayton believes.
"They'll run into these people in their own families or through other people
they know," he says.
"Wives" is overwritten in spots, but it also pulses with vivid, authentic scenes
and delicious moments. The story rolls like a train through Marty's life — high
school in the Pacific Northwest, Va., tours of the Mediterranean and back to the
United States where he meets a girl named Marigold from a religious commune.
Clayton's other novels — 2000's "Until the Dawn" and "Imprudent Zeal" from 2004
— also unfold in various towns across America. They're informed by Clayton's own
life — as a kid from Tupelo, Miss., ’50s and then took off for New York City,
where he worked for Everything for Everybody, an organization that provided
housing, meals and clothing for the poor. He met his wife-to-be, Gabi, in New
York, and together they moved back to Mississippi to start a similar operation,
the Persons Service, and a literary and arts magazine. After much financial
struggle, they moved to Olympia in 1988. The couple, married 33 years, are now
leading activists with Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or
PFLAG.
Customer
reviews from amazon.com
click on the link above to read the complete reviews
ENJOYABLE, IRREVERANT J. R. Callner "a cook"
"... quite a few laughs and some poignant loss, to boot."
By Anthony J. Adam
"WIVES interweaves a number of 'coming out' stories into a portrait of
the development of a glbt sensibility amongst family and friends in
Washington State."
GOOD CHARACTERIZATION AND DETAIL L. E Johnson
"...develops Marty's emotional and intellectual journey from the 1960s to the
present with admirable candor and sometimes luminous humor."
By Van B. Cook "vbc"
"Although it contains its share of tragedy, the book is fun to read."
LOOK AT THE WORDS Margaret W. Ward
"Literary editor"
"... paints word pictures in all his work of something so simiple as a rustic
roadhouse or as distasteful as hate crimes that can be so vivid the reader is
compelled to read farther."
