The Spectators

Starred review from January 15, 2019
A mass high school shooting prompts a reckoning for a controversial talk show host and those around him in duBois' (Cartwheel, 2013, etc.) third novel."He was Matthew Miller then," remembers a man named Semi, the host's lover in the 1970s, who knew him as an idealistic lawyer and then a candidate for mayor of New York. But in 1993, when The Mattie M Show publicist Cel is struggling to defuse reports that two high school boys who gunned down multiple classmates watched his show regularly, Mattie presides over a TV carnival of people confessing to "vices and depravities the average viewer didn't even know existed." The show's evolution from a substantive public affairs program to a wildly popular venue for "rubbernecking and mayhem" is more explicable than Mattie himself, an empathetic interlocutor of the damaged and deranged on camera but a mystery to his staff off the air. Semi's recollections of their affair and break-up intertwine with Cel's story to create an atmospheric chronicle of New York's bohemian gay subculture in the freewheeling 1970s, a keening depiction of the AIDS-stricken '80s, and a poignant portrait of Cel, who got out of the rural working class via Smith but still lacks the self-confidence to claim--or even know--what she really wants. Mattie remains remote and enigmatic, even in his final encounters with Semi, which move him toward a fateful change of direction without readers ever really understanding him. This is not a fault but simply a given of duBois' accomplished narrative, which ranges widely to investigate contemporary culture through the complicated human beings who inhabit it: Cel's party-girl roommate and a judgmental pal from Smith, a predatory journalist, the TV show's seen-it-all producer, and one of the shooters (via a scarily thoughtful letter to Mattie) are among the other characters sketched with acuity and perception. The ending respects Matte's opacity but allows him to make some kind of amends to Semi, while Cel gets the fresh start she deserves.Elegant, enigmatic, and haunting.

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February 18, 2019
DuBois (Cartwheel) spans some 30 years of New York City history, moving between the queer gestalt of the 1970s and the television-junkie culture of the 1990s in her solid third novel. The story revolves around Matthew Miller, a sensationalist Jerry Springer–like talk show host who becomes the target of unwelcome media attention following a high school shooting whose perpetrators turn out to be fans of his The Mattie M. Show. Readers follow Mattie’s put-upon publicist Cel as she navigates a treacherous landscape of scandal and recusal. But as the skeletons in Mattie’s closet begin to emerge, readers become privy to the story of Semi Caldwell (who narrates a portion of the book), his secret past lover, when “Mattie” was simply Matthew, an upstanding lawyer and would-be politician in the heady days of Stonewall, before AIDS ravaged the gay community in the 1980s. As the story cuts between eras, the media circus that precipitates Mattie’s fall from grace comes to mirror his abandonment of Semi, who eventually shows up at his TV studio looking for answers. DuBois beautifully handles Semi’s half of the novel, told in first person, but the third-person Cel sections, in which she plays detective to piece together Mattie’s past life, lack the power of Semi’s. Though somewhat uneven, this is nevertheless a powerful novel. Agent: Henry Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

Starred review from February 15, 2019
So who is Matthew Miller, really: an attorney who is a public defender? A politician? A closeted gay? The host of the Mattie M Show, a sensational and sensationally popular afternoon TV program (think Jerry Springer)? Or is he all of the above? Answers are sometimes forthcoming from DuBois' co-protagonists, Semi, a playwright who is Miller's erstwhile lover, and Cel, a young publicist for the show. Semi tells his story in his thoughtful first-person voice, while Cel is remanded to third-person, the novel's action moving back and forth between them. Set in New York between 1969 and 1993, the novel offers a remarkably acute examination of gay life in the 1970s and, especially, in the plague years of the '80s, while inviting speculation about the place of the Mattie M Show in American popular culture. This last is exacerbated when two aggrieved teens responsible for a mass shooting at their high school are revealed to be Mattie M Show fans. What will the fallout of that revelation be? The Spectators is a beautifully written, even aphoristic novel ( promiscuity, like class, is a spectrum on which everybody claims the middle ), but its greatest strength is its characterization: Semi and his gay friends, Cel and her mother and grandfather, and, of course, the always enigmatic Mattie are brilliantly conceived and, like the novel in which they star, utterly unforgettable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2019

What causes a socially conscious public defender and burgeoning New York City politician to reinvent himself as the crass host of a reality television program designed to showcase our basest instincts? And what do we make of the 16 million spectators who thrill to the staged fights and tearful confessions on The Mattie M Show? DuBois (Cartwheel) takes readers on a trip from the late Sixties gay liberation movement, through the AIDS scourge in the Eighties, to the Nineties, when a mass school shooting still had the power to shock. Two narrators, Semi, a gay playwright and Matthew Miller's former lover, and Cel, Mattie's hapless publicist, attempt to unravel the mystery of the man whose public persona differs wildly from his private one. Dubois's writing is most powerful when channeling Semi, who rages against the disease that decimates the gay community, lamenting the exhaustion of caregiving, the weight of grief, and the resentment toward those who, like Mattie, are spared yet stay silent. Only years later, when fans of Mattie's show are blamed for an act of violence, will he take a stab at redemption. VERDICT A Whiting Award winner and Pen/Hemingway nominee, duBois writes an especially timely novel exploring the power of the media to foment chaos and the culpability of the public that validates the discord by watching. [See Prepub Alert, 10/8/18.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2019

Talk show host Matthew Miller chronicles a flailing, failing society by revealing the unsavory secrets of others on live TV, but no one knows much about him until high school students responsible for a mass shooting are revealed to be big fans and his own secrets as a rising young politician in New York City are spilled. From a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a PEN/Hemingway and NYPL Young Lions finalist.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.