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, all but penniless and stripped of privilege; to be queer and working class to boot; 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 challenges that humans are confronted with as they face adulthood, the traditions and laws that are by and large the product of old religion. Ojo is a celebration of possibilities, of novel ways of creating a world, even as the old ways continue to bear down and haunt a person. But most of all it's a story of finding love in the 1980's in the west, in cowboy country, at the beginning of the HIV pandemic.
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"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." -- Booklife
"Ojo is a giddy celebration of the free love that thrived before the onset of the HIV pandemic in the 1980s. Youth and hormones meet in a queer cast that had known mainly harassment, violence, and even death up 'til then. In another sense it's the queer version of Love in the Time of Cholera, about the many difficulties caused by a mash-up of chance events, played out against the macho backdrop of the American West. What emerges are countless visual details that render the story cinematic, intimate and personal, and thus all the more tragic. Donald Mengay pictures a world in all its photographic richness, a world that could only have bubbled up from raw experience and memory. It is a rich visual culture captured in words." -- Hrvoje Slovenc, Photographer and Filmmaker
"The joy is in the prose, infused at the line-level with yearning and melancholy. An impressionistic epic of self-discovery in the American west." --Kirkus Reviews
