Volume 44, Issue 4

GIVEN THE HIGH volume of submissions we receive at MR, you might suppose that we'd be cynical about the current state of writing. On the contrary, what's frightening is how well most of it reads as it washes over the transom. Only about 15% of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry can be rejected instantly. What makes it difficult to tell the good from the excellent is that in each genre there is a prevalent style-of-the-moment that many have mastered. This style, defined broadly to allow for consider able variety, may well.be the vehicle for something marvelous, or it may just sound that way. Conversely, most of the ones rejected off the top go down for lack of that basic mastery.

Rarest of all is the piece that disregards fashion and finds its own way—always a dangerous path. And so Thomas Glave lit up a rainy Sunday of rejecting when he came to the top of the pile, first with "These Blocks, Not Square," which he subtitles "Five Movements" because here, contra the muted rhetoric of these times, is musical prose. Orthodoxy says that a beautiful surface may be an impediment to clarity, and a throwback to discredited lyricism. What if the wheel came round again, so the sounds of Woolf or Proust or Faulkner seemed dazzling, but dazzlingly clear? So we wondered about Thomas Glave when he first came to these pages nine volumes ago. Now we stop wondering.

And then we found "On the Difficulty of Confiding, With Complete Love and Trust, in Some Heterosexual 'Friends.'" Here Glave s music works in the service of ideas just as unconventional as his prose. For those who believe that the success of gay politics is complete, that the now-easy reference to a subject once unspeakable is enough, Glave's essay shows how much remains to be changed, even and especially now. The emotional power of the prose may give pain, but pain, beauty, and possibility together are the stuff of prophecy. And in prophecy's rare moments, what fool doesn't listen?

David Lenson
for the editors

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