This year’s winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, Justin Torres’s Blackouts is a complex story about recovering the history of erased and ignored gay lives.
Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, quickly became a cultural phenomenon when it was published in 2011, the kind of novel that appeared on social-media feeds and celebrity reading lists. The book is a marvel—it is slim and ferocious, and proceeds at a relentless pace, as if exhaled in a single breath. Throughout, its gaze remains fixed on the life of a family in upstate New York that is struggling to remain afloat while contending with poverty, isolation, and other deprivations. The reader can guess what exists beyond the frame of this intimate portrait, the social forces shaping the life of this family, but they can never be sure: Torres’s attention does not waver from this close-up.
His second novel, Blackouts, which was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction yesterday, also focuses on a close bond, this time between two people, a young man and a much older one. But this book is considerably more ambitious, and the relationship at its center serves as a conduit for considering neglected and abandoned stories—especially the ones that tend to get erased by those in power. Blackouts incorporates photographs, scripts, and other literary fragments to reclaim history—particularly queer history—and offers important lessons about how the forgotten past might be recovered and assimilated into an understanding of the present.
The opening of this novel resembles a dreamscape—the details are imprecise and ephemeral. Torres begins with a heavily redacted page of text, followed by a picture of a naked man reclining on a table, his face partially obscured, and a besuited man, his face also hidden, standing over him. In the first line, the narrator declares, “I came to the Palace because the man I sought kept a room there.” We soon learn that the narrator—who is never named—arrived at “the Palace” from “the metropolis”; the reader doesn’t know where or even when this story is taking place. As the narrator says, “In the desert, in the Palace, I lost track of time, not just of the hours and dates, but also of a certain sense of the temporal, the march of a single day.”
Instead, Torres draws the reader’s attention to the relationship between the narrator and the person he is visiting, a dying man named Juan Gay. The two men briefly met nearly 10 years before, when they were patients at the same mental hospital. A decade later, the narrator has decided to track down Juan. This time, though, their interactions are charged with urgency, because Juan has a job for the narrator, and time is running short. Juan would like the narrator to “finish the project that had once consumed him, the story of a certain woman who shared his last name. Miss Jan Gay” (the two aren’t related). Jan Gay was a real-life pioneering queer researcher who worked to unmask and deflate negative stereotypes about homosexuality in the 1920s and ’30s. Though it’s not exactly clear what Juan’s project is, he seems determined to weave the disparate elements of Jan’s life and work into a comprehensible record of her contributions.
Read: Why did gay rights take so long?
Over the past several years, Juan has compiled many materials related to the project: a folder “stuffed with scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, photographs, and scribbled notes,” and “two massive books whose pages had been mostly blacked out,” though it’s not known by whom. The books form a two-volume report titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—an actual document authored by the psychiatrist George W. Henry that appeared in 1941, predating the Kinsey Reports by several years. Published by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, the report comprised 80 case studies about queer people and included their family background, their personal history, and a record of general impressions, among other information. Though Sex Variants was premised on the notion that homosexuality was deviant, it offered a candid depiction of queer life in America at that time and played an essential role in demystifying a lifestyle that was foreign to many. Curiously, unlike the real report, the novel’s version is redacted; when the narrator inquires who has “blacked out all the pages,” Juan replies that he “found the books that way, erased into little poems and observations.”
These redacted pages appear frequently throughout the book, and invite close inspection. On many occasions, I found myself pulling the text closer to my eyes to see if I could determine what had been obscured, or make sense of what remained. These “blackouts” seem to comment on the plight of communities around the world whose histories have been censored or destroyed, or were never documented in the first place. Because they were not members of some privileged class, these people needed to instead fashion a narrative of their past from anecdotal odds and ends.
Read: Creating the first visual history of queer life before Stonewall
Much of Blackouts is a kind of Socratic dialogue between Juan and the narrator, yet instead of trading philosophical arguments in order to unearth essential truths, their principal mode of communication is storytelling. The stories that form the backbone of the novel are Juan’s sketches of Jan Gay. Juan reveals that it was Jan who initiated the Sex Variants report, and that she was subsequently erased from its history. The real Jan was already a published author when she started compiling the study, but she needed to secure the sponsorship of a group of scientists to help legitimize it. The group, which became the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, eventually took over the project, nullifying her efforts. Jan’s experiences represent a kind of blackout; her identities—lesbian, female—seem to have prevented her from gaining the authorial credit she deserved. Juan eventually reveals that he knew Jan when he was a child, and supplements the archival material he has collected about her life with memories of the time he spent with her.
As the narrator and Juan discuss Jan’s life, they also begin to exhume memories from their personal histories. At one point, the narrator relates an episode in which he suffered a blackout while the faucet in his kitchen was running; both his own apartment and the one below, where his landlords lived, were flooded. The narrator’s description of his blackout is revelatory:
The landlady’s screams had not reached me directly. Several moments passed until I startled out of my reverie, though on the edges, I felt the screaming; it echoed somewhere deep in my mind. When inside the blackout, I remembered, or relived, and sometimes I relived lives that were not my own. I was somewhere else, with someone else. A woman, a scream, and a great silencing.
This is not a typical blackout, where the victim temporarily loses consciousness and retains no memory of what occurred while they were inert. Instead, the narrator was aware of the unfolding disaster but seemingly unable—or unwilling—to attend to it. Torres implies that some blackouts aren’t absolute; indeed, the redacted books still contain discernable information—“little poems of illumination,” as Juan calls them. Blackouts can yield details that might help construct an account of the past. Regardless of what may have happened to you, the book suggests, the past is recoverable.
Read: Fiction meets chaos theory
Juan and the narrator devise literary strategies to overwrite the gaps and redactions in Jan’s story and their own (“But promise me,” Juan says, “you’ll bend, and lie, and invent, make the inertness malleable”). Among other approaches, they engage with each other using the conventions of cinema; on the page, their conversation unfurls as script. As Juan and the narrator converse, details about who they are and when the story is taking place slowly come to light. A procession of proper nouns gradually enters the tale. We learn that the narrator’s father joined the Air Force just after the Vietnam draft ended, that his father is Puerto Rican and his mother is white.
The effect of these subtle revelations is akin to the experience of visiting an optometrist and sitting before a refractor; each page of Blackouts is like a lens that Torres clicks into place, some of them clarifying your vision, others obscuring it, until, eventually, you can see. Torres entwines fact and fiction throughout his novel—“wherever there are facts, those facts are embellished, through both omission and exaggeration, beyond the factual,” he writes at the end—but one thing remains clear: Juan and the narrator’s commitment to uncovering history makes the present more available to them and to the reader, underscoring how difficult it is to fully inhabit the current moment without an understanding of what has come before.
In its robust and multivocal treatment of storytelling, Blackouts provides a guidebook to communities that are seeking to repossess their past. Torres draws the reader into an opaque narrative, and though he leads us toward clarity, we never quite arrive. However, the book seems to suggest that exchanging anecdotes and tales, in the way that Juan and the narrator do, can fortify people who have been marginalized in the here and now, and guide them toward a conception of what could be. For them, storytelling is more than a source of entertainment; it is a key to survival.
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