A tour de force, 'Blackouts' is also the year's sexiest novel

Twelve years ago, Justin Torres leaped into the literary spotlight with his debut, "We the Animals." Now, Torres swings for the bleachers in "Blackouts," a transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love. Just longlisted for the National Book Award, it's easily 2023's sexiest novel.

In a western desert town, an unnamed twentysomething hustler looks after an older, dying gay man, Juan Gay, whom he'd befriended when both were hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. A master of gallows humor and Shakespearean references, Juan's ready to shuffle off his mortal coil at the Palace, a decrepit, unearthly mansion straight out of a de Chirico painting. The unnamed narrator, whom Juan calls "nene" ("sweetheart"), also is prepared to unburden himself. Each night the two confess torturous histories, weaving fact and invention, tales within tales — formal flourishes Torres deploys to astonishing effect.

At the center of "Blackouts" is "Sex Variants," an actual 1941 study that compiled the experiences and insights of 80 gay people, fastidiously researched by Jan Gay, whose name was all but omitted from the record. As a child, the fictitious Juan knew Jan and her partner, the artist Zhenya, who used him as a model. His copy of "Sex Variants" is heavily redacted, but the occasional word or phrase slips past censors; as he reads, we glimpse a rich, recondite society, pre-Stonewall, teeming with its own codes, hierarchies, and imagery.

Against a backdrop of police arrests and physical harm, many real-life people, including Harlem Renaissance actor Edna Thomas, voluntarily stepped forward, profiles in courage. Torres offers a group portrait in a stunning semicolon-studded sentence: "They came to advocate, to inform, to protest the raids and roundups; they came out of curiosity; they came on a lark, for a bit of a hoot, and found themselves intrigued; they came as a favor; some arrived angry, righteous; others confused and suicidal; more than a few came with desperate hope for a cure."

An heir of the Gothic tradition, Torres is out and proud with his writerly pedigree, name-checking Tennessee Williams and Manuel Puig and alluding to Jean Genet and Scheherazade. Juan notes, "They carved a place where there was no place."

But "Blackouts" is hardly a mashup. It steers clear of contrivance, thanks to edgy illustrations, an origami structure, and the author's exquisite eye and ear. This is a novel of ideas, too, brimming with queer history, racial defiance and the injustices of the Freudian era, reminding us that homosexuality was only removed from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" in 1974. ("Blackouts"' title refers to trances and convulsions, possibly genetic, that stigmatized Puerto Ricans.) The finished book is itself an objet d'art, with stylish mocha typeface and endpapers, underscoring Torres' fraught investigation into the nature of art and literature.

"Blackouts" does so much in a tight space that it's difficult to convey the many reasons it's a tour de force. Run, don't walk, to buy it.

Hamilton Cain, who reviews for a range of venues including the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn. His next review for the Star Tribune is of Paul Lynch's "Prophet Song."

Blackouts

By: Justin Torres.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 305 pages, $30.