REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS, bisexual love & happiness just beyond reach

REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS
DEWAINE FARRIA
Syracuse University Press
$22.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Gabriel Mathis, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring fantasy writer and reluctant Russophile, travels to Ukraine to teach English and meets the love of his life: an international arms dealer very much out of his league. Simon—a former Special Forces medic, torn over a warped sense of duty and a child he did not want—returns to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a mixed martial artist. After spending his adolescence defending his bisexuality, Michael makes his mark in New York's fashion industry while nursing resentment for a community that never accepted him.

Farria traces the lives of brothers Michael and Gabriel and their friend Simon from adolescence to their mid-twenties, through Oklahoma, Afghanistan, New York, Somalia, Ukraine, and New Orleans. Revolutions of All Colors is a brash, funny, and honest look at the evolution of characters we don't often see—black nerds and veterans bucking their community's rigid parameters of permissible expression while reconciling love of their country with the injustice of it.

At its core, this is a novel about the uniquely American dilemma of chiseling out an identity in a country still struggling to define itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: So, what does one do with a story that sets him reeling, causes hours-long meditation breaks, and ultimately makes him want to scream in outrage? How, on each and every page, something just...beats against the inside of his skull? No, not the racism.

I'm used to stories about how hard it is to be Black, but told in the SATANIC SECOND PERSON?! Okay, okay, not *all* of it's in the Satanic Second, but more than the occasional bit it...everything from Simon's PoV. (And why doesn't Michael have a voice? The bisexual and proud of nothing man could be a novel by himself!)

Oh my stars and garters, it took a lot out of me to finish this really well-structured, emotionally resonant as only the most complete and truthful ones are, novel of three brothers. Well, two brothers and a brother-friend who's essentially raised by their father. Quite, quite fraught, these relationships...and it shows in the way the narratives are created: Simon, the outsider, gets the Satanic Second Person narrative voice, which hurts me to see or say; Gabriel (every time I read his name I hear Blow Gabriel Blow, even before...events...transpire) the direct address of first person along with his beguiling love interest the Ukrainian arms dealer; Michael...a ghost, no direct narrative. It's a complicated schema (in the literary sense) that guides the reader's perceptions and responses to each character. It also reinforces the characters' own sense of themselves, with Simon being the perpetual outsider, only addressed never addressing, and Michael the unwanted Other, something he can never forgive the world for. He opts out...bullied bisexual different lad, it's the only way he can see to make himself the center of his own story. He has to vanish himself from the world he came from to present himself in his new milieu of the fashion and beauty industry. And how perfect is that, I ask you....

So the burden of this refrain is that fathering isn't parenting, and mothering can only get a boy so far. The people in your life, all of them, are part of your coming-to-be process for better or worse, and they're there because they could be, chose to be, and chose you. Again, for better or for worse. Simon, whose wildness is more a cosmic scream of agony, never stops, rarely slows, and always disappoints. Hey, it's an identity...and Michael, whose fade-away was so much less theatrical than Simon's, is the one who calls him to account. When their father, their shared father, dies, as we know our elders must, it's bog-standard typical of Simon that he doesn't show for the funeral of this man whose presence in his life was an anchor, a stability that he had to reject to bring into the open the rejection he feels he must deserve. "He was your father too. Closest thing you had. But fatherhood doesn’t mean shit to you, does it?" says Michael, invisible gone-away Michael, to him, hitting the one sore spot that only your real family can reach.

The blow lands; the wound is mortal; but to what, remains the question.

The read is part of the Syracuse University program called the "Veterans Writing Award sponsored by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Syracuse University Press." Longer-term readers will remember my review of Thomas Bardenwerper's Mona Passage, also a winner of this prize, and see the thread that connects them: I like reading about people not like me, and not like me in positive, interesting ways. Author Farria writes as a veteran (as I am not) and about bisexual Black men, absolute hen's teeth in the QUILTBAG representation algorithm. Bisexual when unmodified by "man/male/men" is now meant to be read as "woman." Or so it seems in the marketing done to the QUILTBAGgers. I am all for that changing to include the bisexual men of our various overlapping communities.

What made this novel such a good read for me was that acknowledgment that we, the QUILTBAG folk, exist in all families, take up space that we deserve and we are entitled to, and that goes for every family everywhere. It's telling that Michael's bullying drives him away; it's telling that he is the only one to have the standing to call out Simon, the man mired in a sense of himself as unworthy, because Michael has been sent that message as well. It's the way Author Farria makes all those pieces come together that gives me such a vivid and personal sense of this read's message of inclusiveness. It's a screwed up family that produced Simon, Michael, and Gabriel, but it's a family and it is a powerful one to make men whose monstrous sadness and pain didn't destroy them. Take a minute...think about your own life...what were the before-and-afters there? These three men, brothers, are bound by that before-and-after that came long before the showy, flashy one.

Definitely a talented writer's first novel. May many more follow it.