Blackouts, Justin Torres
“Torres interrogates the concept of storytelling and the narratives we tell people and ourselves in order to protect, ingratiate, comfort, shock, or simply to connect.”
It is hard to place Blackouts in one genre category, as it is a staggering display of creative dexterity and an incredibly imaginative work of literary fiction – it is quite unlike anything else I have read.
The title gestures to the extracts of text that are redacted from medical literature, such as the Diagnostic Statistician Manual, which grossly misdiagnosed and inaccurately pathologized ‘conditions’ believed to be abnormal, primarily homosexuality. Torres uses the 1941 publication, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, as a source text that spotlights the research collected from queer subjects by anthropologist Jan Gay, whose ground-breaking work was co-opted and stifled by peers – her own name erased from history.
Largely set in a remote facility in the desert called ‘The Palace’, Juan Gay, a man edging towards death recounts fragments of his life with the narrator. As he fades from one existence to another, he shares stories from his childhood while simultaneously imagining previous and future lives. Torres transcends linear storytelling and there is a touch of the Tony Kushner about the way he writes, most particularly found in the moments of hallucinatory divergence from the present, as well as the aching tenderness and trust that underpins his central relationships.
Blackouts deftly moves between topics, such as the erasure of queer history and mental health but, at its heart, Torres interrogates the concept of storytelling and the narratives we tell people and ourselves in order to protect, ingratiate, comfort, shock, or simply to connect.
Drawing on many literary devices, entire pages are sometimes dedicated to just two lines of dialogue that are so compact and perfectly formed, they would work as stand-alone poems. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was a work of nonfiction, but Torres reminds us that this is a work of fiction, cryptically referring to Juan, as ‘himself a fictional character whether or not he existed’.
Fiction this good should never go unnoticed and, last month, Blackouts was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction. Torres’ star is set to only rise further with such talent as this.
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