The Lookback Window

[+ Lucky]

In other forums here, there is some wonder why people wait years to report that they were sexually abused. The Lookback Window, by Kyle Dillon Hertz, tells one man's story. It is powerful and depressing. Starting at 14, he was raped and abused by an older guy who sold his services to other men for three years. The book details plenty of abuse and is hard to read in that sense.

It's a novel, not a memoir. But that bad things happen to young men is an inescapable fact. I quote from the review of the novel in the New York Times:

At the outset of the novel, New York State has passed a new law called the Child Victims Act, which greatly extends the statute of limitations for new child victims of sexual abuse. Previously, child victims had until they turned 23 to report being assaulted. (New York actually passed such a law in 2019.) For people who sit in the gap of the old law and the new law — people who don’t qualify for the new law’s definition of “new victims” but who have already aged past the old law’s statute of limitations — there is a one-time exception: a yearlong period when they can bring a civil case against their abusers. A lookback window. That window has opened, and Dylan must peer through it. It’s a grimly effective frame for the narrative, a clever literalization of the trapdoor of trauma, how the facade of the present collapses under the weight of the past.

But “The Lookback Window” is not the courtroom narrative of pain and testimony and justice one might expect from this setup. It is more like a journey into hell. Confronting the past comes with a cost. Driven by a restless, reckless fury, Dylan descends into a world of surreal abjection, of bar fights and drug binges. In doing so, he realizes the word for what he wants: “Not justice. Vengeance.”

At his best, Hertz sheds the trappings of traditional realism, adopting instead a swerving, almost psychedelic style that mirrors the abrupt and mercurial perceptions of a turbulent mind. He follows the worthy example of writers like Jean Rhys, Gary Indiana and Denis Johnson (Dylan’s tattoos reference Johnson’s own debut novel, “Angels”), all of whom have written brilliantly about wounded people in degraded circumstances, salvaging a ferocious humor and a jagged, weary poetry from the wreckage of the world.

“The Lookback Window” is also a novel about the lives of gay men in America today, about sex and marriage and parties on Fire Island, and the varied forms of intimacy and recovery that might be found in such things. Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment. It’s an achievement of language, of style, in which the process of finding one’s way back to the world is considered at least in part as an act of learning to “speak the unspeakable.” It’s a matter, Hertz seems to say, of finding the right words.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/review/the-lookback-window-kyle-dillon-hertz.html?searchResultPosition=1

Edited October 4, 2023 by Lucky
sp