Book Review- Looker: A Novel

 

Looker: A Novel (Atria Books)

Stanley Bennett Clay (Author)

“The black gay culture is such a marvelously fascinating thing. It can’t be captured in one book; not in a hundred books. I could write books for the rest of my life and would only scratch the surface with regards to the intricacies of who we are as black gay people,” well spoken in a recent interview by Stanley Bennett Clay, the author of such books as In Search of Pretty Young Black Men and his most recent Looker: A Novel.  Clay, as we all should, acknowledges that Black Gay men run the spectrum of socioeconomic levels and class in American society, and he refuses to cater to stereotypes, but instead pursues honesty and therefore shows the complexities of our beauty. 

 

In Looker: A Novel, Clay revisits denizens of gay black upper middle class Los Angeles.  Clay expertly uses Brando Heywood as the protagonist.  In Brando, an intelligent and dangerously handsome entertainment lawyer, the author finds the perfect eyes and ears for this world.  Unlike, the seductive Dorian Moore in his previous work, Brando doesn’t hypnotically use his sexual prowess for financial or revengeful purposes, but rather does not understand his power and chooses to suppress many of his feelings.  This makes Brando all the more appealing to the readers and those around him especially his best friend, Omar.  We meet troubled characters such as the Rev. William and his wife Vanessa, who will do anything to fulfill his sexual appetite to keep up a façade and her marriage.  Clay poignantly introduces us to the beautiful wife of a politician who lives in the past and will not forgive herself for her voracious sexual proclivities that turned her most precious treasure away. A court trial worthy of the movies and some of the hottest sex scenes in modern literature keep you enthralled and reaching for the lotion. Clay provides the readers with a wide array of characters, both central and peripheral, who add dimension and girth to a story that will leave the reader hungry for more, which allows the reader to relate to the characters that are all hungry for something – sometimes for things they cannot even comprehend.  Looker: A Novel is on bookshelves now.

-Jared DeWese