Aoibheann Sweeney’s novel is a little bit gay

Among Other Things I’ve Taken Up Smoking delivers us a poignant new voice in Aoibheann Sweeney. She deftly maneuvers family relationships and adolescent sexuality through the eyes of Miranda, a young girl who jumps from a solitary Maine island to bustling Manhattan. Both settings, albeit in wildly different fashions, give the narrator room to explore not only her own identity but also the past of her recluse, widower father.

Sweeney’s sparse prose are fitting for a novel of half-secrets. It’s rewarding to read fifty pages of clean, clever prose leading to a single line, like a revelation, as when the narrator describes a walk on the ice with her father: “Snow flurries rushed between us, two black shapes without the world.”

Interestingly, despite details being limited by Miranda’s naiveté and denial, the father’s story has much more depth. His romances are full of tragedy and self-denial, a classical nature to all three, while Miranda’s appear youthful dalliances. It’s no spoiler to say that the father shares a deep bond with Mr. Blackwell, the ubiquitous caretaker, even if it never reaches a physical climax. And while it’s hard to believe young Miranda doesn’t catch on sooner, the subtlety and restraint with which that delicate familial triangle is portrayed aches with authenticity.

The father then is Sweeny’s brilliant trick. Distant and cold, he nonetheless embodies a quiet fantasy of many gay adolescents: a gay parent, not that the parent might be sexualized but that they might identify, might share that connection. In fact, the father’s homosexuality is never acknowledged outright. But this matters little. The real lesson, the futility of these fantasies and childish expectations, comes as the narrator realizes that a parent’s love does not belong to the child alone, that many of the secrets that separate are merely truths we have not allowed ourselves know.

AMONG OTHER THINGS, I’VE TAKEN UP SMOKING
By Aoibheann Sweeney
The Penguin Press, 2007

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