An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis

Our book today is the fantastic 1998 novel An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis, a volume I've recommended and gifted countless times since it first appeared, even more times than its predecessor, Merlis' stunning 1994 debut American Studies, mainly for two reasons: a) though extremely intelligent and moving, American Studies is couched in very much the same ease of AIDS-era gay self-pity that seems to inform 99 percent of gay fiction from the period (see Laura Argiri's The God in Flight, or Christopher Bram's In Memory of Angel Clare, even, underneath its flint, Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance), and b) I have a rather pronounced soft spot for the mythical world of the Homeric epics - and for Homeric pastiches of all kinds, but especially novelistic ones (some of you - a very few, naturally - will even have read one or all of my own trilogy of such novels, Troy War, Steve Donoghue's Ulysses, and The Telemachiad).

I've been reading what could lightly be termed 'Trojan War fiction' for a long time, reading the infinite variations that are all the spiritual descendants of the great, the mighty Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer (and, further back, the Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna). I have championed Homeric adaptations in all their multiplicity, from the youth of the 20th Century (Christopher Morley's The Trojan Horse, for instance, or John Erskine's deceptively subtle The Private Life of Helen of Troy) to the early 21st - in fact, it's probably safe to say I've read virtually every such pastiche that's ever been written in English, and I could read two more tomorrow without boring of the conceit.

Likewise gay fiction, which went from the long decades of being deformed and fugitive (see David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's heartbreaking anthology Pages Passed from Hand to Hand for a good overview of some of the bizarre shapes 'gay' writing took in the long years when openly declaring itself would have meant prison or even death - certainly career death - for anybody who dared to do it) and then came into its gruesome, unwanted heyday when the AIDS epidemic struck and unthinkable tragedy had at least the silver lining of catalyzing works of genius.

So naturally I was predisposed to read An Arrow's Flight when it appeared and very likely predisposed to like it - and I wasn't disappointed. It's Merlis' great book (like most of his readers, I've given up hope of seeing more long fiction from him than the three novels he's already written, and 2003's Man About Town was just strange in its underlying compulsions - it read like the work of a recluse, even though it wasn't written by one), and every dare it takes succeeds. It relocates the Trojan War to the more-or-less present day and situates it in the long stalemate during which the Greeks are looking desperately for anything to tip the scales in their favor. One of the foremost such x-factors is Neoptolemus, the son of legendary Achilles. There are prophecies that say Troy can't be taken unless Neoptolemus is a part of the victory, but in Merlis' book the gorgeous boy has fled from all responsibility and goes by the name Pyrrhus, working as a go-go dancer and rent boy in the gay ghetto of a derelict city, rooming with hapless, good-hearted Leucon, who distracts himself one evening from the muffled conversation Pyrrhus is having with one of his tricks by watching some desultory television:

He sat in the living room and turned on the TV with the volume as low as he could get it and still hear. There was some standup comic telling hate jokes in a nondiscriminatory fashion, everybody got theirs, but especially queers and women. Leucon felt righteously uneasy, laughing at that stuff. But the guy was funny; pussy farts and limp wrists might be funny in a world that could stop at laughter.

You catch the sharp, sad notes of the narrative right way, and those notes are carried along magnificently by Merlis' edged, elegant prose as he contemplates the exquisite waste of Pyrrhus' life as it trembles on the edge of mattering:

This is as close as most of us come: when there is a change ahead, so certain that we refuse to make ourselves at home. Then we may, for a little while, be awake to everything. As Pyrrhus was, while he waited for his real life to begin. His days were endless and his nights hectic with the narrowest facts: parts of bodies; the pictures on people's walls; the code words in telephone calls; the different ways people swore; the various deities they called on when they came.

Because the gorgeous boy can't escape the prophecy of his key role in Troy's downfall, any more than one other key player can escape it: Philoctetes, inheritor of the fabled bow of Hercules, who was afflicted with a poison early in the Greek campaign, an incurable disease that made him a pariah among his own comrades and drove the Greek captain Odysseus to maroon him far away from the action. The same muddled prophecy - or maybe it's merely desperation - says that Troy can't be taken without Philoctetes and his unbeatable arrows, and things are going so badly at the novel's beginning that Odysseus is forced to re-think his actions all those years ago. He has a tense exchange with old Phoenix, the wily corporate lawyer baiting the faithful retainer:

"Now who's the superstitious one? Philoctetes and his magic bow. The bow's not actually going to do anything. It's a symbol or something. Maybe Philoctetes is superfluous. I don't know why we should bother with him."

After a moment, Phoenix said, "Maybe you need to right a wrong."

Odysseus was involuntarily impressed that Phoenix should have come so close to guessing his thoughts. This was probably a necessary skill for a career lackey, but not one Phoenix would have had much opportunity to practice, working for Achilles. Achilles didn't have very many thoughts to guess. I want to eat. I want to sleep. I want to kill somebody.

"I didn't commit a wrong. I did what any practical captain would have done. He was destroying morale. I would practically have had a mutiny on my hands if I'd left him on board."

"You don't have to persuade me."

"No," Odysseus said. "Do you know, I had forgotten him? In the heat of everything else, those first years, before we settled down into this eternal stalemate. Since then I've had altogether too much time to think."

"And you think about Philoctetes."

"Understand, it's not that I think some god or other is literally punishing us, keeping us from victory until we bring him back. It's that I can't go on. It - I don't know - it breaks my concentration." He had begun pacing. "Do you know, I've never won a case without believing that my side was right?"

"You've never defended a guilty client?"

"Oh, of course I have. Innocent people don't need to pay my rates. Anyone who hires me is guilty almost by definition. But they are procedurally innocent. I don't get nearly so outraged by someone embezzling or taking a bribe or even killing somebody as I do by the state proceeding improperly."

"So now that you're the state, you think you've proceeded improperly and that's why we can't win?"

"Something like that."

Phoenix smiled. "I hate it when people say 'something like that,' as if I were a bit dense and we'd all better settle for a near miss."

As the novel progresses, Pyrrhus decides to go to Troy and maybe reinvent himself, and his encounters with bitter, haunted Philoctetes are charged with double and triple meanings. The whole book is, really: there are meditations here on the bleak joys of survivors, on the impartiality of war, on the searching of youth, on the nature of beauty, and on the unthinking brusqueness of the straight world toward the gay world, especially in the immediate wake of an epidemic that brought those worlds into such close and ragged contact. That epidemic is masterfully, crushingly summoned in the book's brutal, beautiful final scene, but it would be mere reportage without Merlis' gift for drama.

You'll never read a piece of gay fiction or a piece of Trojan War fiction even approximately similar to this one; I highly recommend it.