YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD, exploring queer desire's darker corners

YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD
JOHANNA HEDVA
And Other Stories (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available 15 April 2025

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Finalist for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize
An artist of color becomes obsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamour of Clarice Lispector and the viscerality of Han Kang.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the specter of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

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

My Review: The way I know queer folk are, for want of a more accurate and inclusive term, assimilated into the Borg Collective straight peoples' overcultural awareness as real, fully human people is the virulence of the Gawd Squad's attacks on our rights, and our young people (by which I mean everyone born from 1984 on) feel it's okay to write about messed-up, creepy, mean, or even evil queer people. In other words, people. Just plain ol' humans. No need to fancy it up with initialisms that help us find each other but become tiger traps of ghettoization over time.

Here's a novel about a mixed-"race" (a term I hate with all my passion mobilizable...we are all humans none of us are neanderthals or antecessors!!) lesbian at the ragged edge of youth shading into middle age finding out how easy it is to fall into obsessive love when your hypercapitalist life starts to spontaneously deconstruct under the weight of expectation. Becoming fixated on someone like you see yourself being, only moreso, someone refined, and just...better...is justifiable to others and yourownself when the object is from the group at the pinnacle of society's desire hierarchy.

The object is then defined by the terrible, reductive term "muse," one definition of which that I think is relevant here is: A muse represents more than a mere subject or source of inspiration; it embodies the very essence of creative energy and inspiration itself. The muse possesses a unique allure that captivates the artist’s senses, provoking emotions, ideas, and a deep connection that fuels their artistic expression. It is not limited to a passive role but actively participates in the artistic process. They stimulate the artist’s vision, evoking a profound response and encouraging the exploration of new artistic territories. And Hanne, the white woman in her current, sold-out (!) painting series, is not her first "muse" nor her first racialized lust object.

In many ways, our unnamed narrator...called "Johanna" as a proxy for the author, but still explicitly stated not to be the author, so not named...painting Hanne (note how similar the beauteous muse's name is to the author's) for a highly prestigious gallery show is falling into the ugly territory that dogged Nabokov when he wrote the bitter, angry, utterly misunderstood Lolita. Inspired by the conventional white-woman prettiness of Hanne, so distinct from the narrator's own constructed "mixed" identity, she's creating beautiful artworks that are (she tells herself) critical of and interrogating the primacy of whiteness in the construction of a concept of beauty.

The art collectors and institutions who will see the show, however, will most likely buy them because she's painting a pretty picture of a pretty woman whose skin is white.

The deep-seated inner conflict between her Korean father's immigrant economic striving and Asianness and her white artist-mother's centrality to everything she's desired to become as well as escape is brought to crisis point when a Black friend issues a manifesto, calling on artists of color to boycott the white-centered art/beauty industry. If she ignores the call, she's made implacable enemies out of longtime friends, but most likely saved her school-debt-ridden, broke-ass economic life. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of this particular story, however, for all the complex and fascinating issues it raises and grapples with, is a simple sentence fragment: "...it takes hours to paint a portrait, and this is who I wanted to spend hours looking at."

There it is. Has the narrator burned out her exoticizing fascination with the women of color who served as muses before Hanne, or is this loudly, argumentatively toxic assumption of control that is the relegation of a person to the role of "a muse" a form of revenge on whiteness like the paintings are? Or, and this seems likely to be true to me, is the artist painting Hanne finally giving in to hypercapitalism's siren song of money, approval, and fame?

Are any of these untrue, or mutually exclusive? Not in my eyes. They're all likely to form part of the mosaic (another word related to the original Muses) of the core truth of this dark, brave narrative. Queer desire is as murky and incomprehensible as all desire is; made up of dark and angry stuff, bright and uplifting stuff, all rolled into the minds of the lovers...though all too seldom examined, or shared, or even acknowledged. Hanne feels the muse's rage and outrage at being Othered; the narrator the desperation of feeling intensely an unshared emotion.

It ends, as great and passionate loves must, in tears and bitterness.

This is exactly why I loved it as much as I did. The prose earns four and a half stars for economy of imagery, just enough not too much. The messy, angry queer desire slipped that extra half-point on for the full five.