Beheading Game by Brenda Webster
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: January 2006
- Publisher: Wings Press TX
- Format: Hardcover, 256pp
- ISBN-13: 9780916727246
- ISBN: 0916727246
Synopsis
Flamboyant New York theatre director Ren is passionately in love with Jack, a younger man who is still under the thumb of his conservative CEO father, Malcolm. Jack's differences with his father range from the fact that Jack is still in the closet regarding his sexuality to having to endure his father's platitudes about self-improvement and his contempt for Ren. The fact that his father's oil company is dumping toxic waste into the Hudson River doesn't help since cleaning up the river is one of Jack's missions in life. Tensions mount when Jack becomes critically ill with lymphoma and has to undergo a bone marrow transplant which will either cure him or kill him.
At the same time that Ren is tending to Jack in the hospital, he is busy staging his version of "Gawain and the Green Knight." His struggles with Malcolm over Jack's love lead Ren to question the values of the medieval story - especially the blind loyalty of the young vassal to his lord - and he ends by inverting these feudal values in a wild cross-gendered sail against the currents of History. Behind this shift in dramaturgy is Ren's gradual realization that the battles that count for him as a modern (loving) man are fought by changing bedpans and bandages, not waving lances and swords. Life and theatre become intertwined as Ren increasingly lives his life as drama, enacting ever more baroque - and occasionally risky - fantasies of revenge and Love's Triumph. Beyond the ambiguities of gender and sexual orientation, The Beheading Game finds that the issues of love and death, honesty and loyalty, are the same for all of us.Annotation
Nominated for a 26th Annual 2006 Northern California Book Award in the category of Fiction.
Publishers Weekly
Ren is a New York off-off-off-Broadway director putting on a play derived from a medieval legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the legend, the knight breaks into King Arthur's court and makes an absurd challenge: the knight will cut off Gawain's head-but Gawain can return the blow in a year and a day; Gawain takes the dare. Ren, in his production, adds various contemporary touches, including a radical shift in ending. Meanwhile, Ren sometimes fantasizes that his lover Jack's father, boorish Malcolm Firste, is the green skinned monster-knight (they're not out to him). The tension turns critical when Jack undergoes radical stem-cell replacement for cancer at the moment when Ren's play turns into a hit: Ren is invited to Italy and wants to take Jack with him to convalesce, but Malcolm won't hear of it. Ren, however, discovers things about Malcolm's own love life that offer possibility of blackmail. What would be the knightly thing to do? It's a rather odd question, and readers, unfortunately, aren't given much reason to care; the closet thing just doesn't work. And while Ren's stagecraft and Jack's treatment are nicely described, Webster never gets the legend, the production and Ren and Jack's relationship compellingly aligned. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Brenda Webster was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore, Columbia, and Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is a freelance writer, critic and translator who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome, and she is the current president of PEN West. Webster has written two controversial and oft-anthologized critical studies, Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study (Stanford) and Blake's Prophetic Psychology (Macmillan), and translated poetry from the Italian for The Other Voice (Norton) and The Penguin Book of Women Poets. She is co-editor of the journals of the abstract expressionist painter (and Webster's mother) Ethel Schwabacher, Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (Indiana 1993). She is the author of two previous novels, Sins of the Mothers (Baskerville 1993) and Paradise Farm (SUNY, 1999), and a memoir, The Last Good Freudian (Holmes and Meier, 2000). The Modern Language Association recently accepted for publication Webster's translation of Edith Bruck's Holocaust novel Lettera alla Madre. She is currently working on a novel about the tragic death of Freud's most brilliant disciple.
Customer Reviews
Beheading Gameby Anonymous
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February 25, 2006: I loved this book, and couldn't put it down. The gay characters are believable and engaging, and the struggle between the lovers is still, unfortunately, timely. The degree to which one person is out compared to the other is an evolving element in gay relationships, and the issue presented in 'The Beheading Game' is as heart-wrenching as that of the lovers in 'Brokeback Mountain.' I'm not a big fan of medieval poetry from whence Gawain and the Green Knight comes from, but the metaphors applied to a contemporary story are apt and effective. Scenes set in the hospital and the theatre are some of the most memorable in recent literary history. Overall, quirky and romantic, and a novel that I think both gay and straight readers will enjoy and relate to.
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