I recently finished Outline of My Lover, a short, poetic, and haunting novel by Douglas A. Martin. The story feels very autobiographical — it’s written in the first person — and concerns the life of a young kid (and then man) from the south who while in college becomes the lover of an unnamed celebrity, which it doesn’t take much to figure out is meant to be ____, or the lead singer of the famous rock band ____.
The relationship never feels particularly ‘balanced,’ and as readers, we’re subjected to a pervasive cruelty in the treatment of the narrator, who as time passes becomes increasingly resigned to his status as something more like a disposable object or ‘accessory’ than a person (much less a lover or boyfriend or ‘partner,’ despite the fact that they spend around four years together). When you add HIV/AIDS into the mix, there’s a sense of doom that hovers over the story; from the start you know how it’s going to turn out — at least in terms of the relationship — and it’s not particularly happy. At the same time, the prose is very beautiful, which provides a kind of redemption for the narrator (and the reader) and keeps the pages turning until the end.
The book ends up being an indictment of fame, which seems to arrive only at the cost of losing one’s soul.
