Sep 4, 2009
Review: God Says No by James Hannaham (Bumbershoot 09 Preview)
By: MattBriggs Categories: Books Review
{ McSweeney's New Fiction, 9/15 5:15 Literary Arts Stage at Bumbershoot 09 }
[God Says No | James Hannaham | McSweeney's Books | $22 Hardback ] In the novel, God Says No, Gary Grey tells the long story of his life. He believes he can somehow overcomes being gay if he just loves Jesus enough, if he can just learn to deal with (meaning crush) this fundamental aspect of himself. The story follows Gary growing up. At first he is not even aware that he is gay; this lack of self-awareness is gently funny. Gary understands he finds men attractive, but since this is how he is, he kind of guesses that same sex attractions, referred to in the book as SSAs) are a phase everyone goes through. He hopes to grow out of them. Gary attends a Christian College and only when he begins to date girls, does he realize that he may like girls but he has no interest in having sex with them. He meets a woman from Samoa who he likes, and finally marries her in order to force himself into a heterosexual life. For a time, he lives another life at the margins of his former life, until finally he actually assumes another identity. His wife and daughter believe he is dead. He lives as a deliberate outcast and refugee from his community. Finally his wife tracks him down. She brings in a ministry especially designed to save homosexuals from their homosexuality using a cocktail of religion, pop psychology, and brain washing. The ministers take him to a facility full of other gay men struggling against their homosexuality. The place is run by “recovered” gays. None of the participants in the institution are allowed to leave. In the facility Gary gradually learns deep skills for repressing his sexuality. He excels in fact and becomes a model graduate, a recovered gay tapped to establish a new clinic in Atlanta.
Author James Hannaham excels at creating flat characters in a few lines, and then quickly filling them out as conflicted, complex characters. Gary himself exists as a fat gay man who has long since given up the struggle with his body’s size. He finds chairs difficult to sit in. At one point when he is asked to pick out some second-hand clothes, he has difficulty finding ones that fit. His homosexuality exists as a similar physical reality.
Gary desires to be at peace with himself as a gay Christian man. At no point does he consider losing his faith — and yet being gay is considered beyond the pale, and so he struggles against his own elemental nature. It is the matter-of-factness, not of gayness but of his faith, that I found fresh about God Says No. He enjoys going to church AND sleeping with men, yet for the vast majority of people who go to church, he is unacceptable.
When he finally finds a community it is one of repression, where even a hug between two men becomes weighted with sexual tension, potential release, and betrayal of the two men’s effort to find détente with their supposedly conflicted nature.
The surprising aspect of the book is that even the people who run the homosexuality recovery facility are fully drawn and sympathetic. Everyone in the book is trying to do what they think is right. It is the lack of logic at the very center, that somehow homosexuality itself must be corrected, that serves as the book’s antagonist. The characters’ fairly literal and conventional understanding of the scriptures and their church’s doctrine is at no point questioned. The ease that Hannaham displays in illustrating this logic, while finding very few people despicable, creates a crushing but moving narrative as Gary Grey becomes intractably lost.
