Rat Bohemia

by Sarah Schulman

Overview

A reprint of Sarah Schulman's brilliant 1995 novel, with a new introduction by the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551522715
Publisher:	Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited
Publication date:	05/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	143,799
File size:	238 KB

About the Author

Sarah Schulman is the author of eleven previous books, including eight novels, the latest being The Child (2006). As a journalist, her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Interview. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and two American Library Association Gay&Lesbian Book Awards. She lives in New York.

What People are Saying About This

Mark Doty

"Funny...and full of rea news about American life."

Editorial Reviews

Parental abandonment is the theme of this dreary tale of gay and lesbian life on the edge in New York City. Rita Mae Weems, whose father kicked her out at the age of 16, still hears the disappointment in his voice when she phones him years later. She works as a rat exterminator for the city's Department of Health, and everywhere she looks she sees decay and vermin, both human and animal. Her friend David, a young writer dying of AIDS, spends his last months mourning his dead lover and his dead friends and meditating on why his parents hate him. Pondering the narrow boundaries of parental love, he observes that ``they're glad we're dying... really they're relieved.'' Killer, their chronically unemployed friend, is more philosophical, if also more simplistic. ``We're bohemians,'' she says proudly. ``We don't have those dominant cultural values.'' Indeed, these three would refuse to fit into the mainstream, even if the mainstream were generous. And they're united in their scorn of Muriel Kay Starr, a lesbian writer who ``moved to another neighborhood and got closer to power'' and wrote a closeted novel called Good and Bad, in which they (David, Killer and Rita) appear as characters. For no apparent reason, Schulman (Empathy) tacks on, as an ``appendix,'' the first four chapters of Good and Bad. Very little binds this ``appendix'' to the four other sections that comprise the novel; in fact, very little, other than the presence of the principal characters and a theme of resentment of parents, binds the other four sections to each other. Only the dying David, ironically, seems alive, animated by his rage at his impending death. His loneliness and eloquent anguish only partially salvage this meandering tale of a city so befouled that it leaves the reader wishing for a bath. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Schulman's continuing chronicle of contemporary gay and lesbian life (e.g., Empathy, LJ 11/1/92) resonates with depth and emotion as she focuses on the lives of three individuals abandoned by their parents because of their homosexuality. David is an HIV-positive activist and writer coping with both his illness and the rejection of his parents. Rita is a rat exterminator for New York City, a streetwise lesbian whose father threw her out at the age of 16. Killer is a professional plant waterer, looking for a lover to replace the family whose rigid, old-world morality cannot bend to encompass a lesbian daughter. Using rats as a metaphor for the spread of disease, the ugliness of human behavior, and the deterioration of civility in general, Schulman creates a heroine who gamely goes after the rats one by one, refusing to cede her city to its population in the same way that she refuses to compromise her values to accommodate straight society. Because of the author's gifted ear for dialog and witty repartee, the novel is not only a poignant cry for understanding from a community that has had to reinvent family in order to survive emotionally but also a dense and vital portrait of life on the fringes of society. Highly recommended.-Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.

Library Journal

The sadness of gay and lesbian children rejected by their parents pervades Schulman's new novel. Far older than their years, numbed by the deaths of friends and lovers from AIDS, these young people shuffle through lives of truncated expectation. Guarded and cynical, they yet are always on the lookout for some love to compensate for withheld parental affection. Schulman writes from the perspectives of three characters: Rita, a rat exterminator for the city of New York, whose widowed father threw her out at age 16 when he found her in bed with another girl; David, dying of AIDS, whose father wants praise for at least letting his gay son in the house; and Killer, Rita's best friend, whose only current job is watering office plants. Counterbalancing the book's bleakness is the stubborn life force that enables the protagonists to persist and to hope for reconciliation, maybe not in their lifetime, but for future disowned gay and lesbian youth.

Whitney Scott

"My surrender to Rat Bohemia is...a testimonial to its dimlit-eyed accuracy, its zero-degree honesty....The force of [Schulman's] indignation is savage and has blown the traditional novel off its hinges." -- New York Times Book Review

Edmund White