Every teenage male coming to terms with being gay is familiar with the phenomenon of the unattainable boy. He’s the one you spend all your time with, who casually throws his arm around your shoulder when you’re out together, kisses you on the cheek, sleeps on your bedroom floor after parties, and suggests that you go inter-railing together when your exams are over. In fact, the only thing he doesn’t want to do with you is lock lips.
Sometimes the unattainable boy is a genuinely nice person, oblivious to your desperate, tongue-tied adoration. Sometimes he’s getting off on the power he has over you. Almost always, he’s the cause of your first broken heart.
For Theron, the narrator of August Thompson’s debut novel, the unattainable boy is Jake, with whom he spends a summer working in a New Hampshire hardware store. Theron is a regular 15 year old, shy, awkward, obsessed with heavy metal music and convinced that he looks like Shrek’s less attractive younger brother. Jake is his opposite in every way. Extrovert. Handsome. A boy who charms everyone, old and young, who floats into his orbit. But it’s not just his looks to which Theron is drawn, it’s his entire personality, for Jake is everything he wishes he could be.
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There’s a terrible loneliness at the heart of Anyone’s Ghost that makes this a very sensitive read. Like anyone his age, Theron has yet to develop the emotional resources to cope with his feelings and so goes wherever Jake goes, does whatever Jake does, and tries not to cry himself to sleep whenever one of his text messages goes unanswered.
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These are universal emotions, of course, and I welcomed Thompson’s decision to make no issue of Theron’s sexuality. Perhaps the modern world has moved past that, and contemporary literature has followed suit, coming-out stories lacking the trauma of times past. (An exception might be made for novels originating from less-developed countries; the Nigerian writer Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s recent debut Blessings, for example, tells a very different story.) Instead, he focuses on the pain that comes with falling in love for the first time, and the despair that follows when, with the passing of time, it becomes clear that those feelings were not some short-lived crush that can be confessed to and laughed about in years to come, but something far deeper.
The novel is spread across a decade, opening with the revelation of Jake’s death and closing with his untimely funeral, for the poor boy has a habit of getting into car crashes, each of which threatens to send him to the great hardware store in the sky. Like a character in a Final Destination movie, however, trucks, trees and drunk drivers keep colliding with him until the Grim Reaper finally gets his man.
Despite playing the leading role in Theron’s life, Jake remains rather enigmatic. He has a girlfriend, Jess, who is rarely seen, but to whom he appears fully committed. When Theron, early in their friendship, pruriently digging for information about their sex life, asks an inappropriate question, Jake draws an immediate line in the sand, indicating his loyalty to her.
Thompson’s narrator is more complex. By choosing never to define his sexuality, he’s simply a young guy who’s open to sleeping with anyone who’s interested. As an adult, he builds a wholly credible relationship with a woman, Lou, while simultaneously enjoying sex with men, behaviour that she neither actively encourages nor forbids. (Like Jake’s girlfriend, Lou is very much a peripheral figure, and one suspects she has her own intrigues going on.)
There was only one aspect of this excellent novel that I found unconvincing, but it would be too much of a spoiler to reveal its nature. Suffice to say that, as with any long-term relationship, the bond between the players changes over time and an unexpected turn did not leave me fully persuaded. That said, however, it would not be an exaggeration to say that when Theron learns of his friend’s death, a watershed moment in his life delivered as a mere aside by someone who does not understand its significance, there’s an echo of Jack learning of Ennis’s unexpected passing in Brokeback Mountain and it’s equally potent.
The unattainable boy will always be out there, but a genuinely powerful debut that succeeds solely on its merits instead of hype is a lot harder to find. Anyone’s Ghost, however, is one.
