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Donald Mengay
Author
Ojo
To run for your life and be naked, literally and figuratively; to be pursued by your past, eyed and tracked by those you left behind; to be in a foreign environment, penniless and stripped of privilege; to be queer and working class; to feel the burden of loss keenly; and to know that somehow you have to start over, create a new life, connect with others and construct a home for yourself, from scratch, never mind you're completely clueless as to how––finding refuge in that storm is what Ojo is about. It surveys the many youthful challenges that humans are confronted with, the traditions and laws that are by and large the product of old religion, which continue to hang on and at times destroy lives, senselessly in a modern world. Ojo is a celebration of possibilities, of new ways of creating a world, even as the old ways bear down. It's a story of finding love in the 1980's, in cowboy country, at the start of the HIV pandemic.
Reviews
This moving, challenging novel of a young gay man coming of age in the 1980s pulses with moments of connection and freedom, explored in prose that exults in its own liberation: “Thus time, tortoise and torturous, hale and hare. Rich in paradox, it travels. At a rate of 67,000 miles per hour. It catapults us with a flaming center.” The narrative explores the lives of gay men at the onset of the HIV pandemic in Ojo Caliente, a “neon mountain town” whose stretch of Colorado seems intent on “formaldehyding the past.” The narrator, meanwhile, is facing past and present in incandescent sentences, as he makes new friends, explores his sexuality with an array of men—from those not openly "out" to those with women at home—and contemplates relationships he’s left behind, all as he vows “to scramble, leave the state, go for good.”

The flaming center here is Mengay's blazing style, a stream-of-consciousness gush studded with killer details—“the two of us press flesh to flesh, causing me to frot the horn in rhythmic beats, the sound intensifying on this barren spit below I-70”—wells of deep feeling, and reams of sharp-elbowed, unpunctuated dialogue that, in the briskest passages, offers a reprieve from the prevailing density. Mengay (author of The Lede to our Undoing) demonstrates a mastery of rowdy voices, in chatter and letters, sometimes offering scenes in script form.

But Ojo’s power comes from Mengay’s attention to the senses in scenes of home building, road tripping, boisterous get-togethers, earthy trysts (“Lips and beard abrade my skin, peel me like a tangerine”), and taking the dancefloor at a gay bar that’s like a “studded–and-buckled Araby of the west.” Especially moving is Mengay’s stripping away at the cast’s protective layers, revealing men who are wild and carefree with the narrator yet not free to be so in their everyday lives. Readers who relish uncompromising fiction of substance and ambition will find this wild, wise, and nourishing.

Takeaway: Incandescently written novel of growing up queer in 1980s Colorado.

Comparable Titles: Ali Smith, Alan Hollinghurst.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-

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