Born October 21: Robert Ferro

When editors of the New York Review of Books Classics finally seek me out to ask which forgotten titles must be brought back into print, one of my top five recommendations will be Robert Ferro's novel The Family of Max Desir published thirty years ago, in 1983. Amazingly, it spans three generations and seventy years in the Desiderio family, from Sicily to Brooklyn to New Jersey, in a mere 215 pages. It works because the writing is so swift and right and alive. Reunited with distant relatives after decades apart: "Then he recognized certain faces, older and changed, like music played slower." Pushing forty, the gay character Max worries when he cruises the Village: "People will no longer turn to look at him, will see nothing but themselves being seen." Everything rings true about this family, including their complicated, shifting degrees of acceptance of Max's actor boyfriend of fifteen years, Nick Flynn. Ferro's other novels are his debut The Others from 1977, his final book Second Son when he was dying of aids in 1988, and his third novel, The Blue Star, which Stephen Greco selected for Tom Cardamone's The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered [Kindle].

You already know Robert Ferro as the patron of the Ferro-Grumley Award. He and Michael Grumley met as graduate students and stayed together wo decades, until their deaths from aids a few months apart in 1988. Both men were forty-six. They co-authored Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search. 

Comments

[K.M. Soehnlein]

Agreed! I'm due to reread "Max," which I only partially absorbed when I encountered it in the 80s. Readers interested in Ferro and Grumley's life together should look up David Bergman's "The Violet Quill Reader" and turn to "The Last Diary," excerpts from Grumley's journal, sketching, poignantly, his final year and a half.