Quote:…chains and the sea… Hold still. The rouge must be even. It seems I'm ending as I began, my feet chained to the wall, a roar in my ears. Back then, though, it was the sea, and today it's a crowd. Both hungry, both eager to devour souls. Don't talk so much. Wait. Let me finish your lips first. My life begins with the wooden wall and the roaring sea. To remember further back is to be in hell, and I won't do that. Though fragments of it have haunted me all along. Burning villages. Blood. A crucifixion at a crossroads, an auction in an agora. Smeared! Don't be nervous. You have time to finish this. And… I feel like talking. You must let me. There are things I wish I could tell someone. Especially now, as I'm about to enter the next plane of my existence. I was a refugee. I was a slave boy. I was an empress. I mated with two gods and will soon be a god myself. And all this before my twentieth birthday. Again! Should I mix the rouge myself? Be still. Does it matter? We all know how this will end. Demeter's daughter, the spirit of spring, Proserpina, the beautiful one, appears among the flowers, trees, and meadows. The earth opens, and from the gates of Hades itself appears Pluto, the lord of the dead, with his three-headed hound in tow. He violently seizes the maiden, drags her onto his chariot, kicks and screams, and drives his skeletal horses into the bowels of the earth, while the flowers begin to wilt, while the fruit falls and rots on the barren ground, while the leaves become brittle and yellow, and cold envelops the world. You know how Ceres-Demeter scours the desolate world. How the plants grieve, how the soil turns to stone and can no longer sustain life, how people and animals begin to starve from lack of food. As you know, Proserpina's mother descends into the depths of hell, where her daughter is now queen. How she pleads with the dark god until he relents. How Proserpina is tricked into eating six of its seeds.

   

Quote: Fiction is no privileged shore unto which the writer is invited as a respite for contemplation, no haven for making sense of things. If it’s worth the trip, it plunges the writer in media res, usually without a life preserver, and challenges him to find meaning and closure in the swirling chaos around him, maintaining the thrill of conflict at the same time. The writer, if he wants to create good prose, has to rub his face in the account and take an unhygienic swim in the murky depths of the unconscious. There is, as well, a Catch-22 that characterizes all fiction: if the material is life-shattering enough, personal enough, to warrant the gargantuan efforts to portray it, how can the writer pull himself together enough to do so, without losing touch with the trauma at its crux?
The most astonishing novels are those that portray experiences that are normally too overwhelming to talk about. Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream comes to mind, as do some successful novels about the horror of war. Injecting humor into the mix may be crucial if the reader is to be given a way to hold on. White, Christian, a first novel by Christopher Stoddard, successfully faces such challenges.
Christian White, the fragile but somehow dynamic protagonist of the novel, is about to go under when the story begins. Young, attractive, droll, addicted, frightened, cynical, homosexual, infantile, campy, sexually compulsive, he’s a poster boy for a long list of contemporary dysfunctions. He’s a survivor of sexual abuse who finds no intimacy in sex, a boy with a creative mind who can’t garner the discipline and energy to develop it. Certainly, his lover, a drug dealer, is no key out of the mess he is in. Nor is his roommate, a leftover from the past whom he handles with contempt and is paid back in kind. His shop-lifting, fashion-victim friends are far from charismatic. His witty, sensible sister is someone he can count on, but getting him back on his feet would get her too far in over her head.
Few novels begin with the protagonist having painted himself into such a corner; still less challenge the reader to deal with such a plethora of alienating personality traits and disturbing, humiliating scenes. Yet there is undeniably something “adorable” about Christian, even as his involvement in drugs pulls him downward into a nearly animal, physically degenerative state. How could the story go on from there? For Christian, the challenge is getting out of the current mess into which he has sunk. We expect to be treated to a series of AA meetings and sessions of psychiatric counseling, ending finally with rehabilitation and self-knowledge. But our hero decides that the only way to leave his troubled past behind is to “take a geographical,” as they say in the self-help movement: moving from San Francisco to New York to get out of the situation that has led to his addictions and burying the earlier years under the rug.
What happens in New York is, in some ways, even more disturbing. But by this time, we’ve gained an intimate knowledge of Christian’s family and past, chuckled at some of the perversity of his one-night stands, are privy to the bewilderment and loss that haunts him as the result of his brother’s death, and so identified with Christian that we have begun to see ourselves in him and put all our hope in him as well.
White, Christian belongs to a very contemporary and mostly unpopulated genre of novels about the current generation, probably our least articulate generation, and certainly our least literary. Raised on television and the Internet where information comes quickly and easily but accumulates with difficulty into knowledge, viewing formal education as a stepping stone to earnings rather than to an intellectual awakening, most members of this age group are impatient for quick fixes and rewards. White Christian affords a very visceral view into such a mentality. Perhaps Stoddard has understood that the best way to show it is as gone awry, with its heart, needs and longings finally peeking through the hipster defenses that have been ripped open by bad choices. What is more, such a radical excavation of this generation’s mindset has accomplished the unexpected. It has tied the novel to a tradition. This is not a “gay” novel, but another in a series begun in early twentieth century with the Lost Generation, continued after World War II with the Beat Generation and barely skimmed by the Gen X’ers, which represent the last time it was seen en masse. It is the literary tradition of social alienation, about the lone individual who cannot seem to navigate the repressions, hypocrisies and unthinking cruelties of contemporary culture, the degenerate individual whose degeneration serves surprisingly as a critique of our society.
Somehow, without sacrificing his own acute perceptions, Christopher Stoddard has intimately depicted the whirling frenzy of a soul with little insight into itself, then put that soul through the sharp-bladed blender of calamity, the only road to this particular character’s self-knowledge. And he has made it entertaining and relevant to us. But the most amazing thing about this book is the author’s ability to sustain his vision. Rather than appearing as the face of a struggling person peeking for a moment over the edge of a whirlpool, to shout a few words of discovery before disappearing through the eye, he has remained afloat with the character and taken him to a point at which he can squarely face his own past.

   

Quote:Without the many people who spoke to me, this would not have been possible. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to all those who talked about their most painful memories, events that can’t be forgotten, no matter how much they wish they could. Special thanks to those who did so on the condition of anonymity. I apologize to anyone I failed to mention. Carl and Bunny Croteau graciously answered difficult questions and encouraged me to tell Danny’s story from the time we first spoke in 2004. Danny’s brother Joe took every one of my hundreds of calls and was generous with advice, stories, photos, and often-painful remembrances of Danny and Richard Lavigne. Thanks also to his other brother, Carl Jr. The book would have been impossible without their input and help.

R.C. Stevens provided invaluable information and background. He unearthed more about Danny’s life and death in ten years than four sets of investigators in 35. Bill Zajac courageously penned hundreds of newspaper stories critical of a powerful Church—stories nobody wanted to write, accounts that eventually took down a bishop. Bill offered enthusiastic assistance, and invaluable files, since the first call the day I decided to tell the story. Warren Mason, whose anger forced the Springfield diocese to face its criminal past, provided direction and important recollections. My friend Darby O’Brien offered invaluable counsel for my Phoebe Prince book and did so again here, as did Luke Gelinas, another Phoebe colleague.

A special thanks to several people in the middle of Danny’s story, from the beginning. Drew Nicastro courageously discussed events I’m sure he would rather have kept to himself. Sandra Tessier’s details of Richard Lavigne’s relationship with her and her family were critical to unmasking a suspect never investigated. Jack Downing offered stories that helped define the role of a bishop in all this. Carol Mazzarino, daughter of a central character in Danny’s story, provided invaluable help. I am grateful also to John Stobierski, who fought legal battles for more than 75 cleric abuse victims; longtime Croteau family lawyer F. Michael Joseph; Mike Rezendes and Alan Wirzbicki of the Boston Globe “Spotlight” team, instrumental in exposing the Church’s clergy abuse problem, for their assistance; and Sgt. Mark St. Germaine of the Rensselaer (NY) Sheriff’s Department for trying to find records of an obscure 1971 arrest.

Joe Fitzgerald’s remembrances of a long-ago high school classmate were central to the story, and Brian Fitzgerald offered invaluable advice and stories of life in his childhood neighborhood. To our old and dear friends, Bill and Linda Campbell, again, thanks. Once more, Linda offered invaluable assistance deciphering the psychological aspects behind people and accounts, and Bill provided dozens of Red Sox tickets over the years and took my mind off the dreadful stories by dragging me from my keyboard to play golf. Our family priest, Father Hugh Crean, suffered through hundreds of morning Masses with my brother and I as his altar boys when I was Danny’s age.