We begin novels knowing something about the story they tell. It’s what makes us choose one book over another. In the case of Stephen Gauer’s Hold Me Now, knowing that it’s about a young gay man’s violent death and a father’s grief might incline you to turn away. I can’t overemphasize what a mistake that would be.
Fiftysomething Brenner, a corporate lawyer, and twentysomething Daniel are sharing a meal in a noisy Vancouver restaurant. Their chat, all hit-and-miss good intentions and half-connects, is scattered even more by the din of Friday-night revellers. It’s a picture of parental love hobbled by irritation and generational incomprehension, and its power is entirely in the knowing what they don’t know. Neither father or son has any idea that the precious and underappreciated ordinary is about to disappear. Gauer integrates the scene’s operative tensions – familial and narrative – with great skill.
Next day brings the shock of unbearable news. We follow Brenner’s inner world as he negotiates the call from the hospital, the stolid police, the morgue, Daniel’s battered body. Gauer’s labour here is more evident, but never overwrought or voyeuristic; he succeeds in suggesting Brenner’s trauma-borne disconnect. The shift to later that night, with Daniel’s mother and her partner, revives the steadier authorial gaze. Brenner succumbs to a desperate need for rest and escape: “The bed embraced him like a womb. He slept only moments at a time. By dawn he was wet with sweat and stiff with exhaustion. He felt no hunger, no thirst. He tried to assemble in his mind the things that needed to be done.” One urgent thing is to call his daughter, Daniel’s sister. This brief phone exchange is tremendously moving, all the more so because of Brenner’s helpless missteps.
Brenner has a contract lawyer’s mind. He excels in legalese but can’t read people; his emotional subconscious is always slow to surface. Still, he has worked hard to accept and support his gay son, even while feeling that Daniel’s life is alien. His grieving is complicated by the circumstances of the killing: Daniel’s body was found naked in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. To Brenner, the taciturn police investigators seem full of unspoken accusation. The crime itself is solved in due course, but this is no whodunit. The pivot of mystery is Brenner himself, a man embattled and enraged and deeply at odds with his own heart.
Gauer has full control over these complexities. His supporting cast is expertly wielded. Brenner’s daughter, his ailing mother, his ex-wife (Daniel’s mother), a national newspaper reporter, the lawyers, the accused teenager and his family and accomplices – all become catalysts for our incremental understanding. Rare for a first-time novelist, Gauer has grasped the crucial importance of trusting his own and his readers’ intuitions. He almost never says too much or underscores what has already been more subtly rendered. (An odd lapse is the needless detailing of Brenner’s driving routes around town.)
Brenner reluctantly agrees to sit down with the reporter over coffee. Andrea opens their chat with a personal story of loss, then cuts to overt moral suasion. People need to know how Daniel died “and why violence against gay people has to stop.” Brenner replies with his thoughts on violence in general, but the interior debate is different: “Did he love that his son was gay? No, he didn’t love that part of him.” Brenner’s own erotic encounters leave no doubt that he reveres women’s bodies. Whatever his prejudices against gays, they do not spring from any desperately buried homoerotic desire.
Gauer builds a psychological study of unwavering breadth and depth. That Brenner is not always easy to like matters not a whit. The story is borne along to some extent on the crime-and-punishment drama, but much more on the shifts of the interior journey. Brenner’s anger and sorrow feed on each other. He takes stupid risks that unexpectedly pay off. It’s fascinating at every turn and it leads to a beautifully rendered catharsis. Have a handkerchief handy.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail’s first-fiction reviewer.
