The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Vespertine
By Leta Blake and Indra Vaughn
Published by the authors, 2015
Four stars

I liked this book a lot, perhaps even loved it a bit. I got tears in my eyes any number of times, because the authors have packed this story with ideas that resonate deeply with me.

We meet the book’s central characters in contrasting scenarios in the first chapter. Jasper Hendricks, known as Jazz, but only to Nicky Blumfeld and his parents, prepares for Sunday mass at the cathedral where he is the priest in charge in a small town in Maine. There is a wonderful description as Jasper vests himself in his priestly garments, each added layer accompanied by a prayer. When Father Hendricks pauses before entering his church, he says to himself, “Showtime.” Somewhere else in the world, Nicholas Blumfeld, whose stage persona is Nico Blue, songwriter for the hugely successful rock band Vespertine, prepares to face the loud, insistent audience awaiting him in a concert venue by snorting several lines of cocaine (on top of the heroin he’s previously injected). Then, as he prepares to hit the stage, he, too, murmurs “showtime.”

The next time we see Nicky, he’s back in Maine after a near-death experience on stage and some serious detox. He’s been given time off to recover by his soulless barracuda managers, and has decided to do that by returning to Maine, where his loving and long-suffering parents, Miriam and Adrian Blumfeld await him. His biggest fear and greatest hope in returning home is that he’ll see Jazz Hendricks, his onetime best friend, the love of his life, and the boy who crushed his heart when they were seventeen.

Yes, Jazz is a celibate, but openly gay priest, and Nicky is a drug-addicted rocker.

Because we’re in Maine, we get to know the local denizens better than we do Nicky’s bandmates. We come to understand the complexities of both Jasper’s and Nicky’s childhoods. Jasper, the perfect golden boy, who somehow never manages to live up to his parents’ dreams, follows the insistent call of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Nicky, the adopted child with attachment issues, abandoned as an infant, is the bad boy, loved by his parents in spite of his troubled youth. Of course, Nicky was also beloved by Jasper until circumstances neither of the boys understands tears them apart.

Jasper channels his celibate gayness (gay celibacy?) into a shelter and school for homeless LGBTQ teenagers – improbably funded by the archdiocese – housed in the former parochial school the boys attended together as kids. Nicky channels his deeply-buried pain and loss into angry lyrics that have made his band rich and famous.

Blake and Vaughn take us through the story with careful calculation, introducing us to the people who know these young men now, and who also knew them as teenagers. We come to understand and appreciate the context that produced both the priest and the rock star. We also begin to see that, for all their apparent differences, Jasper and Nicky are still bound to each other by a volatile mixture of love an pain.

This powerful, multi-faceted story is an emotional rollercoaster, with a finale that is appropriately melodramatic. The narrative is also relieved with touches of sardonic humor. Blake and Vaughn know their audience – the loyal legion of m/m readers. In this case, I feel they might know their readers too well, and what could have been a great book ends up being just a really good book.

There are two reasons for this, in my opinion. One, and this is a constant gripe of mine after reading well over a thousand m/m novels, is simply: too much sex. Obviously the long-dormant attraction between the two men is going to surface, and sparks will result. It is essential to the story, and there is real beauty in the way the authors handle both the expressions of love and the physical intimacy between Jasper and Nicky. However, it starts getting way too porn-y at just the moment of peak emotional crisis. At the critical turning point in the plot, when we should be focused on Jasper’s spiritual crisis and Nicky’s addiction fears, they just can’t stop doing it long enough to take a breath. This really blunts the emotional impact of the story.

Finally, I was hopeful, but ultimately disappointed by the resolution of Jasper’s crisis of faith. [Spoiler alert!] The authors decided that the only answer to the conflict of a gay man being a Catholic priest is for him to abandon the church. Are we meant to accept that Jasper’s calling was a figment of his imagination? As a longtime, devout gay Christian, all I can do is note that the Episcopal Church in America (the Anglican Church elsewhere in the world) consistently welcomes into their ranks Catholic priests who, for whatever reason, can no longer remain celibate. The arrogant notion that there is no church other than the Roman Catholic Church, and that you cannot be both Christian and a priest at the same time, is a tired trope, stuck in a Gordon Merrick novel of the 1970s. For me, this did a disservice to Father Hendricks by giving him no options. The idea that he had no Christian community to embrace him in Maine is absurd, even back in 2015.

This book has a happy ending; but there could have been a happier ending, and it would have made everything better.