How Long Has This Been Going on? [Paperback]

This book provides as many reasons to disagree with the author as to agree; but every point it makes is worth considering. Starting from the 40's, and running through to the present day (or as near as dammit) it dissects the gay experience in America over the last fifty years. But this is not a single issue book. It's a book about what it means to be alive, a book about embracing the truth of how-however- one is born, and working out how to live with it; and as such, it should be read by gay, straight, undecided and dead people alike.

One literary work that I have read recently which really touched me, but which surprised me, too, is this lively one by an author, Ethan Mordden, whose writings I always have enjoyed, whether fiction or about film, music, or whatever. "How Long Has This Been Going on?" is only one of the many literary and music-oriented works by this multi-talented writer that I have read and savoured, then re-read again and again, in full or in part. Some of Mordden's other fiction is even better than this novel, but I was impressed at how Mordden sustains the epic style of this 590 page "brick" of a book. Mordden's other works of fiction tend to be episodic, essentially amounting to interweaved short stories, but this massive work shows the author's unanticipated skill in creating a work of such panoramic scale.

The book comprises the accounts of a series of fictional characters whose lives eventually (and ingeniously) come seemlessly to intersect, being tales of the lives of gay men and lesbians from 1949 to 1991 and of the American society of those changing times on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. This is really is an huge accomplishment, never flagging in interest or in coherence. The characters are very sympathetic, for all their peculiarities and failings, which Mordden does not flinch from recounting. My favourite two characters are Blue, a kind-hearted, rustic Southern guy (of the variety so often denigrated as "poor white trash"), who also happens to be of irresistible good looks and multi-orgasmic sexual potency, turned loose in New York City (and parts beyond), and Walt, a very cute and lovably quirky musician from the Midwest, whom fate brings together with Blue, then separates, and finally reunites, amidst the adventures of many other fascinating boys, men (some of them those boys grown older), and women.

Some readers have complained of the artificial and overly highbrow dialogue, but, for the most part, I disagree with this caveat. It is, usually, the more intellectual and politically activist personalities who express themselves in this way, in their own cerebrally "naturally unnatural" way of speech, as it were. The more earthier and more direct characters usually express themselves in vocabulary and diction that are natural and quite believable. The variety of the ways in which each converses abets Mordden's strongly individualised portrayals of them. I find it amazing that a writer from the Mid-Atlantic states (the part of the U. S. of A. from which Mordden hails) is able to capture with such authenticity the folkways and speech patterns of the rural, Southern character from the backwoods that Blue so quintessentially is, conveying with such rightness the slang, accent, regional archaisms, word order, and all the rest of Blue's very Dixified way of expressing himself, with utter believability, yet without any sense of artificiality or of literary condescension whatsoever.

Despite the length of the novel, I was sorry when I arrived at the end of this immense piece of fiction. I wanted it to go on and on, to over the years following the 1990s and the later lives and adventures of the intensely interesting people who populate its pages. Perhaps fate already has given Mordden the wisdom and opportunity to write a sequel that is awaiting publication, of the kind that he has produced so often in his delightful "Buddies" series of novels.

It's amazing how a 600 page novel can keep the reader so closely involved that it seems so much shorter than it actually is. I know some reviewers have noted that it is like a `Gone with the Wind' for gays but in some respects it is. The down side of following such a disparate group of men and women (but mainly men) for 30 or 40 years is that the reader becomes so attached to them and feels almost part of their lives so their disappointments become yours. The characters are just so real and no matter who reads this book you will find aspects of yourself in one or many of them at different times in their lives.
So many of the differing political viewpoints which surfaced from the 30's onward are presented and then we see what they melted into in the Gay Pride March in 1991 with some of the original group still living and doing a good job of it too. Not everyone is so lucky and some of the characters play supporting roles only and fade out quickly - like so many country boys who made it to the cities of New York and San Francisco in the `70s and were able to breathe free for the first time in their lives. So many of them never saw much of the 80's. Their story is told as background for the main protagonists.
You'll find yourself identifying with one character or another and - as I did - perk up somewhat when they returned to the narrative. I only discovered this book by accident and I don't know how the author isn't much better known in Europe. His writing style is very fluid, no words wasted with little concentration on long dreary descriptive passages of nature or buildings or even physical characteristics leaving the reader to fill in the gaps. A brilliant read.