To open any of Michael Lowenthal’s novels is to be struck by the visceral power of his images. From a woman’s “depthless smile” to a man with a belly like a rucksack, from flags snapping in the wind at a WWI parade to a description of an adolescent boy’s braces to a heartbreaking scene of two women doing each other’s makeup in a mirror-less room, Lowenthal’s descriptions wrest the reader directly into his characters’ struggles and delights. Even when his books grapple with questions of sexuality and power, there’s nothing didactic or abstract in them. We experience Lowenthal’s fictional worlds right alongside his characters—and those worlds are quirky and terrifying and sensuous and redeeming, and absolutely recognizable.
Lowenthal has just released his fourth novel, The Paternity Test, from University of Wisconsin Press.
RK: In The Paternity Test, Pat envisions having a child with Stu in order to create a new sense of family. Yet his growing bond with their surrogate mother threatens his relationship with Stu. As the plot of The Paternity Test emerged, what about it felt most exhilarating or taboo to write?
ML: What felt exciting for me to write about—a little bit itchy, if you know what I mean—was Pat’s reevaluation of being gay as his primary way of making sense of the world. I pictured him as someone who, like many gay people, had to reorient his entire way of being when he came out of the closet. He felt he had to sign on to a whole program of what it meant to be gay in his particular time and place: a certain set of attitudes about monogamy (or the lack thereof), a certain glorification of being marginalized, etc. And I wanted to write about how someone who has bought into this vision of gayness might eventually . . . well, might have buyer’s remorse. He might come to see that this new orthodoxy can be as bad a fit for him as was the previous version — that maybe orthodoxy itself is the problem. I have Pat say at one point, about his group of rebellious, New York City, sex-with-no-strings-attached peers: “We had all decided upon the same way to be different.” And there’s another line about how “our brand of liberation became a kind of trap.” I’m someone who has benefitted greatly from the gay-liberation movement, and I have fought proudly in some of its battles, so writing these lines—even from the point of view of a character who is separate from me—felt a bit like apostasy, or biting the hand that feeds me.
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We recently posted Amber Kelly-Anderson’s “Writing by Ear,” where she advises you to play with your words, Seuss-like.
