Greasepaint

(by Hannah Levene)

This book is butches in suits and ties, butches playing piano in bars, butches in black jeans and white t-shirts and black leather jackets. It isn’t about plot: as the novel puts it at one point: “And up at the counter something else happens and outside on the street something else happens and at the next table something else happens.” Or at another point: “They licked ice creams and walked or maybe they stood still and everything else moved past them, all different sorts of people doing all different sorts of things but nothing so different it interrupted anything else.” There are bar brawls and dinners and diners and anarchists and thoughts about possible futures and memories of the actual past. I found the sections with one set of characters (the “anarchist” ones) generally more engaging than sections with the other set of characters (the “All-American” ones), and I sometimes felt like the text should have been edited with more of an eye to Americanization (British words/phrasings like “whilst” and “Fancy a brawl” felt out of place to me). But these are minor quibbles/there were a lot of things I liked in this book, in terms of the overall mood and also on a sentence level. Like this: “Teddy was an awful husband if what it meant to be a husband was to be faithful, but Teddy thought what it meant to be a husband was to stick around which was different.” Or this: “Oh boy it was easy to be a poet when your natural inclination was for everything to start with a great unburdening Oh.”