Overview

Winner of the National Book Award for Becoming a Man, his candid and passionate account of growing up gay in a time of ignorance and bigotry, this third volume of Paul Monette's autobiographical writing brings together an eclectic collection of essays written under the shadow of AIDS. Meditative, philosophical, sometimes blisteringly angry, Paul Monette presents a simultaneously personal and universal vision of the struggle for freedom faced by gay and lesbian people in 1990s American, counteracting reference to his own illness with a unique perspective on literature, politics and religion. Varied yet focused, damning yet tender, Last Watch of the Night shines like a beacon of hope in a fog of intolerance - offering solace to those who think they're alone, raining down shame on those who would have them stay that way.

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9780349106373

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Reviews

Although novelist, memoirist, and poet Monette (Becoming a Man, 1992, etc.) is sometimes vituperative, his language is always sharp in these essays. It is only when he falls away from criticism that his prose thickens and slows down. In Puck, Monette writes in a seemingly benign way about his dog, but it soon becomes apparent that he is communicating something about himself through his unusually unsentimental relationship with the animal. Gert describes an elderly lesbian whom Monette befriends, and his admiration for and puzzlement over the elegant manner in which she both reveals and conceals her sexuality. Monette scathingly attacks the Pope in several of these essays, but My Priests describes the few men of the cloth he actually admires. They include a Catholic priest named Gambone, who left the order after his lover died of AIDS, and Brother Toby, who has organized a lay Catholic community for children with AIDS that sells Christmas trees to raise money. Monette describes his impromptu wedding ceremony, which was officiated by a New Age woman called Ma; Monette skeptically calls her the Auntie Mame of gurus, but he also respects the bluesy sort of comfort she brings to her many HIV-positive followers. In 3275, Monette manages to avoid emotionalism even while describing different graves he has known (those of lovers and those of the famous). He constantly - and effectively - undercuts the material's saccharine potential with passages like Are you reeling from the mawkishness? Because it gets worse. Occasionally this incisiveness is lost. A One-Way Fare, an examination of the importance of different journeys he has made, drifts off into travelogue about halfway through, and the dissection of insomnia in Sleeping Under a Tree is less than involving. A mix of the personal and the political with the occasional misstep. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Paul Monette was the author of six novels and three colections of poems. Becoming a Man was the 1992 National Book Award for non-fiction. He died in February 1995.

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