Homosapien by Julie Bozza

Title: Homosapien
Author: Julie Bozza
Publisher: Manifold Press
Length: Novel (67k/278 pgs)
Buy the book: Publisher

Blurb:

Patrick and David are friends who run a gay bookstore, and life seems simple and safe enough until the day when unexpectedly he walks in – six feet tall, gorgeous and built like a dream. But Homosapien isn’t welcome in their world; he’s a professional wrestler, and everything he does is fake. So he can’t really be gay, can he, or interested in either one of them? Can they even trust a single word he says … ?

Review:

I am neither a wrestling fan nor an enthusiast for sports books. I’ll even admit I have a small resentment toward wrestling since my college boyfriend was obsessed with the WWF. But I was intrigued by the blurb and excerpt of this particular book, so I decided to give it a shot. I am thoroughly glad I did.

David owns Q4, a gay bookstore in Boston. His best friend and employee Patrick is a wrestling fan and has a poster of his favorite wrestler, Homosapien, hanging in their little sofa nook. Homosapien plays it gay for the wrestling audience, and though he takes a lot of heat from them, for Patrick he’s a hero. Color both men surprised, then, when the wrestler himself strolls into the bookstore one day. David, not a fan of the sport, is belligerent and scares the man off, so when Patrick spots him at the coffee shop, he returns to the store to tell David to go and apologize. Thus starts an unusual relationship, as David and Adam – Homosapien’s real name – start circling around each other.

The first thing a reader will notice is the unusual style of presentation. This isn’t your standard past tense, 3rd person, hero to hero POV prose. It presents itself as the retelling on the part of Patrick, an observer to the actual romance that runs through the plot, and deliberately mimics an amateur’s attempt to tell a story when he’s not entirely sure what he’s doing. That means it jumps perspective, it hops between his 1st person voice to a 3rd omniscient he could have no knowledge of (and admits he’s recreating based on later information) to transcripts of phone calls and televised broadcasts. It doesn’t even have chapters, but instead utilizes titles at scene breaks to denote changes in time and place (whether it’s specifically meant to remind me of the ring girls who hold up signs to indicate new rounds are about to begin, I don’t know, but that’s what it did). The entire thing is highly stylized, radically casual, and completely in character for the narrator. It won’t work for everyone. It completely worked for me.

The second thing a reader will notice is that the romance is back burner and subtle for the vast majority of the telling. In spite of Patrick’s assertion at the top of the book that the star-crossed lovers angle helps to make it a great book, the real focus of the novel is the theme. The book is about identity – identity of self, identity of public personae, the conflict of how you recognize it for yourself and how you respect it in others – and uses the world of wrestling as a backdrop to that. That means lots of scenes about wrestling, and backstage stuff at wrestling, and things that have little to nothing to do with either David or Adam. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, because for me, it most definitely was not, but for a reader looking for a strong romance, this might not necessarily be the book of choice. (Don’t pick it up thinking sex replaces romance, either. You won’t find it.)

But this thematic exploration is done with such a deft, comedic touch that I got utterly absorbed by the book and couldn’t put it down. I read it in two sittings only because I literally had to put it aside to go pick up my kids. Otherwise, it would’ve been one. I adored Patrick and his optimistic view on the world, and I fell for the conflicted Adam as he warred between the character he played, the way it was perceived, and his private life as a gay man. David is the out and proud version, who doesn’t understand the necessity of closets or masks, and the contrast between the two men sets the stage for the author to explore her themes of what identity is all about. Even the scant attention to Patrick’s life serves as a means of exploration, as he shields his private life with Mr. TDI (Tall, Dark, and Intense) from those around him until it’s forced to the foreground and his own revelations.

Because the focus is on these themes, some characterizations are short-shrifted, especially those of the so-called bad guys. I would’ve loved seeing more time devoted to Lucifer, another wrestler, but his role within the parameters drawn by the narrator is very finite, and such, we only get hints at complexities beneath his gay-bashing and anger. Another downfall of the book rests on a more technical level. The book is set in Boston with American protagonists. The publisher is British, as is the author. While I can accept British spellings when that’s the case, it’s far more difficult to accept British terminology that isn’t commonly found in the US, like David thrusting a “ten-dollar note” at Patrick to get coffee. It’s jarring when it occurs, though for this reader, my adoration of the story and what was going on made it easier to slip back into the flow.

This book won’t be for everyone, but don’t dismiss it because of its subject matter. If I’d done that, I would’ve missed out on a story that still has me thinking about it days later. I love these characters, regardless of their unconventional presentation. Or maybe, because of it, since it’s impossible to separate the two.