Summer 2012 - Vol. 9, Issue 3

Everett and Reid are young-adult men finding love in the late ‘70s. In addition to the drama surrounding coming out for the first time, the thrill of first sex is rendered in sometimes exquisite, and always explicit detail. (Readers of delicate sensibilities should be prepared, even though it never strikes me as exploitative or gratuitous). There is a class divide between Reid the scholarship student and Everett the casual preppie.

 

There are many books that cover similar ground, such as Armistead Maupin’s Tales of The City series, although Maupin’s work has more wackiness woven throughout. This book is more touching and heartfelt, though the guys’ taste for getting caught having sex is often used for comic effect. Jim Provenzano’s “Every Time I Think Of You” diverges from that sort of book in about the last third, when Everett becomes paralyzed following injuries sustained in a”freak accident” during a lacrosse tournament.

 

In some ways, this presents a challenge to the disability-rights savvy reviewer. Namely, is it enough, especially for a book written by an able-bodied writer, to feature a consistent disabled character, or does every good piece of writing on the subject have to make some kind of profound, empowered, statement?

 

As a disability-rights manifesto, this book could be graded as a failure. Some people would immediately pounce on the fact that the disabled person is not the narrator: the “I” in the story is the able-bodied boyfriend who spends the first weeks after the accident wondering if continuing to love Everett means giving up the full range of physical pleasures he’d just discovered. He finds out later in the book that he’s not terribly interested in sex without love and connection, so even that anxiety is not the rejection it seems at first blush.

 

However, I think this criticism would be ultimately unfair and should be rejected if we ever expect depictions of disabled people in fiction. Having all disabled characters free from insecurity and doubt would probably create a stereotype as impossible to live up to as the beatific Tiny Tim poster-child type. None of us are role models all the time, and I think Everett’s struggles seem real, considering he goes, in an instant, from someone to whom much of life comes easily (with the possible exception of being used as a pawn by his divorced parents,) to someone who has to struggle a lot just to get through every day. Initially, he can’t cope, and pushes Reid and everyone else away to focus on the possibility of regaining his lost abilities in rehab, but when the possibility of miracle cure is denied him, he is finally able to tell the narrator Reid how much he loves and needs him. Reid, who has developed self-confidence during a summer on his own as a park ranger and early studies in botany at college, provides a catalyst for Everett to explore independence, rather than be hovered over by his guilt-stricken mother and family housekeeper.

 

Admittedly, the section at the end where the guys work out their living arrangements works out a little too neatly, without tears and paperwork and Everett stranded on his speakerphone held captive by bad Muzak, but I think that happens for the same reason that readers followed Scarlett O’ Hara in the curtain dress rather than actually into the assessor’s office to pay the taxes on Tara.

 

Those of us who have had these experiences, know there are details involved, but they don’t really enhance the story and might actually take away from the sense of youthful, romantic optimism that permeates the novel as a whole. “Every Time I Think Of You” is fundamentally a romance, and romances, whether gay or straight, are designed to fade to black after the first kiss following that last misunderstanding. I, personally, wouldn’t have this book any other way, even though we never learn if Reid or Everett embrace disability history beyond learning that songwriter Cole Porter was paralyzed, or if they stay together once they make it to the dorms that following fall.

 

They make the decision to work on it. Sometimes, that’s enough.

 

“Every Time I Think of You”, CreateSpace/Myrmidude Press

$14.95 US 160 pages, copyright 2011