The Celibate

June 2, 1997
This overambitious couch confessional seeks out parallels between the spiritual and sexual odyssey of its unnamed gay narrator (born into a repressive Jewish household, he flees into the uneasy embrace of the Catholic church) and two historical catastrophes: Jack the Ripper's 1888 serial-murders and the 1665 outbreak of bubonic plague. After suffering a nervous breakdown at the altar, the narrator has been forced to drop his duties as a priest, enter psychoanalysis and take a job as a walking-tour guide. By turns defensive, glib and self-loathing, he wavers between the story of his troubled life and the historical anecdotes that he takes so much to heart. Unfortunately, Arditti's (Pagan's Father) serious themes are at odds with a superficial style inappropriately crammed with showy wordplay and stagey asides. Worse, the historical set pieces never justify their place in the narrator's tale. In the book's first half, they strain to connect the narrator's naive sexual experiences (with East End rent-boys and pimps) to Jack the Ripper's mutilations ("male sexuality at its most appalling extreme"). In the second half, the history lectures work better, as a village's endurance of the plague stands for the narrator's personal suffering during the AIDS epidemic. Still, if the narrator is, as one hustler puts it, "a spiritual voyeur... a praying Tom," he doesn't entice the reader into watching along.