Blackouts by Justin Torres

Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023--San Antonio

I finished reading Blackouts by Justin Torres last night.  When I was about 25% of the way through the book, it was named the winner of the National Book Award for this year.  It's not a traditional novel; many reviewers have called it an experimental novel.  It is built around a meeting of two men who originally met when they were both in a psychiatric hospital--when one was a teenager and the other was a middle-aged adult.  The older man is now dying in a facility called The Palace and the younger one, who has now middle aged, has come to say goodbye to his friend.  But both men have a need.  They need to share their lives with each other in an attempt to make sense out of what has happened to the two of them throughout their lives and to other homosexual and bisexual men and women throughout time as a result of society's efforts to justify, classify, and treat the existence of the sexual orientations of non-straight people.  Stories of real persons who were actually part of this history are introduced--ones who strived to prove that sexuality differences are normal and ones who tried to connect them to aberrations.  The use of eugenics is discussed.  Ethnicity differences come into the story.  The title of the book comes from two aspects of the story:  1)  From published books that had most of the print blacked out because of the discussion of non-heterosexuality being considered worth censoring, and 2) From the fact that the younger man, of Puerto Rican descent, was committed to the asylum not because he was gay but because he suffered from blackouts that seemed to be a common form of hysteria for people from Puerto Rico.  It's not a book that is easy to read.  But it is fascinating how the author has brought all of this together in such a complex story.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.