100 Boyfriends

December 7, 2020
This stunning collection of vignettes from artist, punk rocker, and Whiting Award winner Purnell (Since I Laid My Burden Down) forms a delightfully crass, kaleidoscopic worldview. Each story introduces new heartbreaks and reminders that moments of intimacy often end in loneliness. In “Boyfriend #666/The Satanist” the narrator describes disappointing sex with a man referred to as “Trench Coat Mafia dick.” In “Boyfriend #4/4/The Drummer” the narrator tenderly asks, “What else is a boyfriend for but to share in mutual epiphany?” Whether falling apart during a punk band’s tour of Europe (“Do They Exist If No One’s Watching?”), searching for sex in rural Alabama (“Hooker Boys (Part Two)”), or sifting through a wealthy man’s drug stash in Hell’s Kitchen (“Boyfriend #100/The Agent”), the characters are joined in their vulnerability and constant longing. The raw, confessional voice in “Meandering (Part Two)” demonstrates the collection’s best quality, as the narrator remarks on the secretive delight of sex with strangers. Purnell brilliantly immerses the reader in Black, queer desire with humor, self-awareness, and just the right amount of vulgarity. Agent: Julia Masnik, Watkins/Loomis Agency.

December 1, 2020
Purnell, a performance artist, musician, filmmaker, and writer, dives deep into the pathologies and delights of sex among gay men in this dizzying novel. In these pages, the unnamed, formerly homeless protagonist, a "jaded judgmental borderline misanthrope" who's also really funny, describes so much sex with a "nameless void of men" that it's a wonder he doesn't rub his fingers raw from undoing his pants so often. There's sex on the protagonist's European concert tour, bad sex with a Satanist in America ("if this was Satan's best sex warrior it stood to reason why Satanism in general was such a PR nightmare"), and an obsession with a straight co-worker that compels the protagonist to masturbate in the office while watching him. Structured in short vignettes, the book is mostly told in a confessional first person, which make the stories feel autofictional. There are so many short episodes of sex that the book reads more like a diary--a vibrant, saucy, dishy, punk diary. One example: The protagonist, feeling lonely, hires a sex worker to act like a boyfriend, so the guy, just doing what he's paid for, keeps whispering "I love you, boyfriend" in the protagonist's ear. "He was beginning to feel like a boyfriend in that he was already annoying the fuck out of me," Purnell writes in a typically knowing, self-lacerating insight. There are moments when Purnell steps back from offending delicate sensibilities to documenting real sadness and drawing wisdom in the process. The protagonist encounters a former boyfriend, "once a big beautiful star" who "has collapsed in on its own weight and turned into a black hole." This man takes the protagonist to his parents' home for Thanksgiving to an emotional void; his parents serve TV dinners for the holiday meal. "But this was one of the many holes he had in himself that he always made visible to me," Purnell writes. The only nagging question this book engenders is why it's packaged as fiction at all; it reads more like a memoir/manifesto that gay sex is still a rebellious act. This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outr� reading.

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March 26, 2021

Purnell's new work is, in the best sense, uncategorizable. It's not quite a short story collection, even less so a novel, though characters and attributes and emotions bleed from one "story" into the next. What's uniform here is that the narrators are all contextualized by the eponymous (ex-)boyfriends, though none are defined by them. It's indicative of a guiding autonomy to the work, and, indeed, in one of the "stories," titled "Boyfriend #100 / The Agent," the narrator responds to a prompt for clarification on a poetry collection's "journey": "I don't care for a journey...I'm just making a map, something that says, 'You are HERE.' " It's a succinct enough thesis of the collection, and what the author has built is a matrix of sorts--of queer men, yes, but more important, of the shapelessness and futility of such labels. Purnell writes rogues and deviants and innocents and the scorned, many of whom meld together, but all of whom are distinct and distinctly human. He executes this free-form vision in what feels like an explosion of pure, profane id, but he perfectly balances his archer instincts with moments of profound delicacy. Given the unconventional structure, it's perhaps inevitable that there are moments, "stories," that feel imbued with less power than others, but they never feel like an afterthought. It's that strength of voice, the ability to carry through even quarter-page narratives with some amount of weight, that marks this as a work worth noting. VERDICT An almost anarchic effort ready-made for adventurous readers; a prism refracting both the brutality and beauty of living.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL

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