Yet another autobiography of a gay man coming out...ho hum! But wait, wait, wait, wait... We have here the exception which proves the rule...This is an autobiography, more a memoir since it deals with the significant and sequential periods of the writer’s growing up without pinning down dates and events. The result is a series of soft-edged water-color images each quite different yet related by the common theme of closeted gay youth growing up and out.
This book has everything this reader seeks in his reading material. The use of contemporary English has rarely been so clear and so elegant. Paul Monette stands, in my mind as a truly gifted writer who happens to be gay. Becoming a Man, subtitled “Half a Life Story”, takes us through Paul’s early life, not a childhood of deprivation and abuse, but one of stable middle class values. Paul knew early on that he was gay but for the bulk of the narrative he never really accepts his orientation. The timespan is, for me easy to relate to: it coinsides almost exactly with my own... A child of the late ’40s and ’50s an adolescence in the ’60s and young adulthood in the tempestuous ’70s.
The storyline is unremarkable. Public school in small middle class town in Massachusetts, private prep school as a scholarship pupil and a “townie”, later acceptance and enrollment at Yale, and finally teaching in the same environments where he was educated. This is hardly the plot of the great American novel, not even the outline of a titiallating tell-all biography. This is what it is about. But wait, wait, wait wait... This is not what it’s about...Becoming a Man is a fine example of the primacy of form over content...in that it is truly classical. What this book is about is words, beautiful words which call out to be read aloud. The feelings that Mr. Monette experiences can not be better or more lovingly expressed. His struggles (most of which resonate with the older gay community) are veritable word paintings akin to the tone poems of the post-Romantic European composers. The images his descriptions conjure up are as soft and well executed as his namesakes’ paintings (Claude Monet, of lily pond fame). The family name was originally Monet but was changed to Monette when all and sundry pronounced it “Monette”.
The writer is a poet. That is apparant from the fluidity of his prose. He is also acutely sensitive and inordinately intelligent. This makes two points in the narrative especially sad. The first is when he seeks the help of a therapist. After some fumbling about the threrapist asks “What do you want? What would you like you life to be?” The writer answers “That’s easy--I’d like to be straight...” The sadness of this exchange is all the more moving since nearly all gay men in therapy during that era probably answered the same way. From our vantage point in the new millennium we wonder... Why? Why not seek a better societal adjustment, a better self understanding, a more integrated personality? But the sad fact is that even though enlightened, many therapists tried to assist their patients in unlearning gayness and becoming functionally straight.
The second depressing moment has to do with timing. For nearly his whole youth and early adulthood this gifted writer and poet never grasped the basis of gayness. It is only at the end with a gay poet friend that his realizes...“It was the first time I’d ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility...” This is depressing because the basic truth was discovered so late. Even sadder is the fact that the young gay community today may still not grasp the inherent validity of Paul Monette’s new found inderstanding.
This book has everything a memoir should have... glorious writing, deeply felt emotion, soul searching passion, and ultimately self-acceptance hard-won though it was. Should you choose to read Becoming A Man you will not be dissapointed.