Since I Laid My Burden Down

April 17, 2017
Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel. The thin plot centers on DeShawn, a gay black man approaching middle age, returning to small-town Alabama after his uncle’s death. He moves back in with his mother, a powerful and demanding Baptist preacher with a shrinking congregation. DeShawn’s daily encounters send him down nostalgic rabbit holes about the men he has lost through death or other circumstances. He remembers his first lovers, the neighborhood boy who molested him, his stepfather’s rages, and other experiences of his deeply constrained Southern upbringing in the 1980s. After fleeing to California at 18, DeShawn falls into an aimless string of sexual encounters and a counterculture lifestyle. While these vignettes do not build up to a coherent narrative, they are carefully drawn, occasionally very funny, and frequently affecting. The even-keeled, almost deadpan way Purnell lays out these tragedies, failures, and losses and the casually explicit tone offer a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire.

April 1, 2017
Sex, drugs, punk rock, and Sunday sermons. When DeShawn takes leave of his fast life in San Francisco and returns to his rural Alabama hometown, he finds time to slow down and contemplate his past and the many men--fathers, lovers, and friends--who have made him who he is. Purnell's debut novel (Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger?, 2015, etc.) is structured as a series of flashbacks to DeShawn's childhood and young adulthood, which is peopled with an abusive stepdad, a feuding mother and grandmother, and kids who share his love of 1990s punk music, partying, and sexual experimentation. Sex and self-fashioning are at the heart of this narrative, and the novel is refreshingly frank about desires both normalized and taboo. DeShawn, whose queerness becomes obvious to his family and community early on, must navigate sexual interactions with kids his own age and the leering adult clergy and teachers whose own desires are warped into power trips (DeShawn "marveled at how much of his young adult life was spent in a room getting spanked by a dirty old white man"). DeShawn's path of sexual discovery is linked to his discovery of self, and as his story unfolds, questions of who, and how, to love become more clearly articulated. DeShawn is a wild child, but he is also an uncle, a nephew, a son, and a community member. Purnell treats his subjects with a heavy dose of dry humor, as when DeShawn's "fag-loving aunt" gives him a handful of Klonopin after a funeral and tells him "Don't overdose, bitch." The novel's style is messy, and DeShawn's inner dialogue doesn't always provide much depth. But DeShawn's story, like any honest story, is a messy one and, for all its rough edges, entertaining. A complex, sometimes overly frenetic, look at one man's experience of being black, queer, smart, soft, tough, artistic, and constantly in motion between rural and urban cultures.

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