TRICYCLIST, slice-of-queer-life novella-length story

TRICYCLIST
JOON OLUCHI LEE
Nightboat Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The love child of The L Word and Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends, with a disaffected flair all its own.

It’s San Francisco in the early aughts, and Howie Song is floundering. His failed projects—as a professional ballet dancer, as a boyfriend, as a friend—have left him forever the “third wheel.” But maybe he likes it that way? Leaping wildly between lovers, centuries, and an ever-changing cultural landscape, Howie might just feel most himself in the fracture.

Delicious, poetic, and delightfully pornographic, Tricyclist is an ode to the “abnormal angles” of people and art. As Howie overcomes his own ambivalences—in large part thanks to two suitors, and a circle of supporters who happen to be lesbians—Joon Oluchi Lee portrays, with his signature flamboyance, all of life’s joys, pitfalls, and pirouettes.

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

My Review: The cover image is...arresting. In a compact 144 pages I was not expecting to get rich, immersive detail, like something explaining why there's a guy flashing his ass from under a schoolgirl's plaid skirt on the cover. That expectation was met. Howie's character is shown to me by the surfaces he gets distracted from his aimless wanderings by. Jeb, for example; the romance blossoming on Jeb's side was doomed because Howie...doesn't, and I went through the cycle of can't and won't before landing on that...reciprocate what I'm presented as sincere interest in Howie. He's not indifferent to Jeb, as we're presented with open-door sex scenes as the romance world describes them. I've read far more explicit and descritive gay sex scenes in the #Hollanov group on Tumblr. Far.

Val and Tish's romance, as Howie looks on, develops nicely; he does not lack for queer relationship success models. He had a past situationship with some guy that we're told stank. I bet I know why: Howie isn't commitment minded. Permaybehaps he will be, but I'll bet not based on what I know about people who seek and form commitments to romantic partners. Howie feels to me, with his surface-level vision and his general absence of attachments to the kind of people he wants to sex up, like a floater. He has his girl-pack who love him and emotionally support him, so he has no reason to risk boredom, domestic routine, deepened familiarity...all the things he appears to be uninterested in. His ballet "career" of useful, decent dancing without seemeing to desire improving his technical skills, still less exploring the deeper creative depths, to excel or even succeed at is a larger example of his aimless rootlessness.

It's a mixed bag of a read for me. I'm always pleased with the juxtaposition of raunch and refinement because that's the way the world really is. It's presented here in thoroughly measured, considered, polished prose. I'm not fond of Howie. I think people who don't want to make commitments are better off sticking to one-night stands. But of course the real issue is, does Howie introspect as well as he dissects others with his lesbian posse? I don't know, I never see it; and if I'm not seeing it I doubt it occurs; so Howie is probably unaware he's hurting others.

We spend 144 pages to make that unremarkable discovery, with pretty prose to sweeten the cup of Life's bitter dregs.

Need to feel involved in a real-life story? This one scratches that bump with the comforting distance of fiction keeping we-the-reader from feeling voyeuristic.