The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a 1991 novel by American author Tom Spanbauer set at the beginning of the 20th century.[1] Told primarily in flashback by its protagonist, a biracial Native American named Out-In-The-Shed ("Shed" for short), most of the action occurs in the late 19th century in the fictional town of Excellent, Idaho,[2] as Shed grows up, learns about his parents, and falls in love. The work is Spanbauer's second novel.[3]
Duivichi-un-Dua, also known as Out-in-the-Shed or just "Shed", is a biracial bisexual who lives in the fictional town of Excellent, Idaho, in the middle part of the 20th century.
In flashback, Shed reveals that in the 1880s he lived with his mother, a Shoshone Indian, and that his mother worked as a maid, laundress, and prostitute for no-nonsense but tender-hearted madam Ida Richilieu at Richilieu's hotel and brothel. The two live in a shed in the rear of Ida's place. Although Shed's mother will not speak about his father, Shed believes his father was a mentally ill cowboy named Billy Blizzard (who had been sexually involved with Shed's mother since Blizzard was 13 years old). Blizzard goes insane, raping the teenaged Shed. Shed's mother tries to hunt down her son's rapist, but Blizzard kills her. Ida Richilieu takes Shed on, so long as Shed acts as a prostitute for Richilieu's customers. Shed agrees.
After a few years, Shed decides to discover more about his father and heritage. He leaves Excellent and tries to find his mother's tribe. On the way there, he meets Dellwood Barker, a Montana cowboy who introduces Shed to a variety of spiritual and mystical traditions. The two begin a relationship. After finding a photograph of his mother among Barker's possessions, Shed comes to believe that Barker is his father. Barker soon sends Shed on his way to the Shoshone tribe, not wishing to hinder Shed in his quest. Shed finds his mother's tribe living on a reservation, and meets the Shoshone medicine man, Owlfeather. Shed learns the true meaning of his name, but shortly thereafter is shot by Owlfeather's son, Charles Smith. Smith commits suicide moments later, and Owlfeather breathes life back into Shed (dying in the process).
After recovering, Shed sheds his Indian identity, considering it killed by Charles Smith, and he returns to Excellent. A new and beautiful prostitute, the widow Alma Hatch, has joined the brothel, and, after Dellwood Barker appears in town, the four individuals form a tightly bonded group that share living quarters and sexual experiences. But the town has changed as a number of Mormons have moved to Excellent, and the town's libertine ways are going away. After some time, the four African American Wisdom brothers (Homer, Blind Jude, Ulysses, and Virgil) arrive in Excellent. Disagreement between the Mormon settlers and Ida Richilieu and her friends breaks out and descends into arson (the brothel is burned down, killing several of their friends) and murder (the four Wisdom brothers are killed). In the period after this tragedy, Ida Richilieu, Dellwood Barker, Alma Hatch, and Shed try to break out of their depression by consuming all the opium and alcohol they can get their hands on. In a haze, Ida Richilieu and Alma Hatch attempt to go over nearby Devil's Pass in a blizzard, but their wagon overturns on a steep hill. Alma dies, and Ida's legs are frozen up to the knees. Dellwood Barker and Shed go after the women. They rescue Ida, but Shed and Dellwood are forced to amputate her legs to save her life. Dellwood Barker goes insane from the shock surrounding this rapid turn of events, and leaves Excellent to die. The Mormons now hold Excellent in their grasp. Shed learns more about his heritage, but the world he knew is gone.
The book concludes with the elderly Shed reflecting on how little has changed in Excellent since the death of Alma Hatch, and how the white people of Excellent are not in touch with their true selves.
Writing the novel
Author Tom Spanbauer was born in Idaho and raised on a farm there,[4] and Spanbauer drew heavily on his upbringing for settings in the book.[5]
After graduating from Idaho State University in 1969 with a bachelor's degree and then spending two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya,[4] Spanbauer married and returned to Idaho where he obtained a job at his alma mater as a counselor and advisor to the student Indian Club.[6] He met and became involved with Clyde Hall, a two-spirit (and later a tribal elder) Shoshone-Métis.[6] Three months later, the two became blood brothers.[6] Hall had a deep influence on Spanbauer that directly led to the writing of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon:
...Clyde Hall put my feet on the ground, and when I looked at the ground I saw that it was my mother. Clyde helped me to see the world was alive and full of mystery. He pretty much took me out of my Christian European culture head and helped me see that I wasn’t separated from nature. That by stepping into my body, I stepped into nature. ... [T]he thing I want to impress on you the most, is my life and his came together in such a way that kind of blew us both out of the water. Speaking for myself, I could never have written The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon without Clyde, or any of the rest of my books.[6]
Spanbauer moved to New York City in 1983 and entered the Columbia University Writing Program.[5][7] Spanbauer took a job as an apartment building supervisor in the East Village, and began abusing alcohol and taking cocaine.[5][7] He began writing The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon in 1987,[7] and by 1988 was deep into the manuscript.[5] The writing process was a very difficult one for Spanbauer. He had so little money that he lived like "a subway rat, pale and frail, trying hard to believe in" the novel he was writing.[7] He later said, "A lot of the stuff I came up with was pretty fearsome, facing some personal devils head-on. I couldn't distinguish between the world and the book. At one point, I was so stressed out, I passed out in Penn Station."[5] As he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after the book's publication, "It's all a matter of trust. You're right in the middle of this story. You don't know the end of it. It's this preposterous tale about these preposterous people, and you don't know what's going to happen next, and you're tired of eating chicken livers and fettuccine, and you're alone in this little square concrete apartment, there's no air or earth, and pretty soon it was hard for me to distinguish what was going on in my head and what was going on on the outside."[7] The book took four and a half years and seven revisions to complete.[7]
In one memorable sequence in the book, the cowboy drifter (and both men believe, Shed's father),[8] Dellwood Barker, has anal sex with Shed and teaches Shed about the "Wild Moon Man"—an anthropomorphic representation of neotantric sex and expanded orgasm.[7][9] According to Spanbauer, the idea for the Wild Moon Man came out of his own imagination:
The Hairy Moon Man came out of my very own dirty little mind. I think it may be based on the archetype of the puer, or Eternal Boy. I hooked up the puer with Narcissus and I got a pool of water. And inside the pool of water is the exact opposite of the fine sensitive boy. The dark side of the fine puer who wants to be pulled down to the darkest place and have his asshole ravished by the hairy beast. Those of us who have made this journey under water, or to the other side—to the under world and back—have an awareness, and a responsibility to the rest of the world to tell the story.[6]
Completing the manuscript did not occur until early 1991 and left Spanbauer emotionally and physically exhausted, so he moved to Oregon to recuperate.[5][7]
Style
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a book in the "dangerous writing" style of fiction actively promoted by author Tom Spanbauer.[10] According to Spanbauer, this is a style of writing which is deeply personal and which directly addresses issues difficult to confront for the author. He explains: "Dangerous writing means putting a piece of yourself in a work, going to the 'sore spot,' and discussing taboo topics, particularly sex and violence. It means writing for yourself, a concept that in the literary world was thought to make you go broke. It means exposing yourself to the tiger, not physically, but mentally."[6] The book also features a writing style Spanbauer calls "going on the body". As author Chuck Palahniuk, a student of Spanbauer's, has explained: "Story can be a succession of tasty, smelly, touchable details. What Tom Spanbauer and Gordon Lish call 'going on the body,' to give the reader a sympathetic physical reaction, to involve the reader on a gut level."[11]
Critics have also observed elements of magic realism in the novel.[12]
Critical reception
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon was very well received when it was published in 1991. The Washington Post called it "amazing" and "dazzlingly accomplished"[13] and The Oregonian said the novel "boldly creates a new voice from the Old West."[12]The New York Times was equally effusive: "The miracle of the novel is that it obliges us to rethink our whole idea of narration and history and myth."[14] The Los Angeles Times found it "brave, original, ribald, funny, [and] heart-rending" and concluded that the book is "as bright as it is dark, full of fictional and philosophical pleasures, a quirky, unsettling look at American history and a vision quest in the grand old tradition."[15] The book's extensive cast of quirky characters was singled out by several reviewers. The Washington Post said the characters were "winningly rebellious...brimming with life",[13] while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said "Spanbauer has populated his pages with characters so colorfully drawn they practically pop off the page and start dancing, egged on by mass consumption of whiskey, locoweed and opium stardust."[7] Reviewers compared Spanbauer to Mark Twain,[7][13]D. H. Lawrence,[13]Gabriel García Márquez,[7][13]Garrison Keillor,[13]Thomas Berger,[14]Walt Whitman,[13]William H. Gass,[14]Molly Gloss,[12] and Russell Hoban.[13]
The novel received some critical comments as well. The Oregonian's reviewer thought the characters were too "extreme," felt that the narrative took too long to get going, and concluded that Shed's method of communicating in sentence fragments (often missing a verb or subject) difficult to comprehend.[12] Nevertheless, while these elements were "irritating", the reviewer concluded: "[T]he exasperation is worth it: There is something triumphant about a novelist who risks this much and manages to find his way home."[12] The same reviewer also found that some passages might make some readers queasy: "Spanbauer's book, his second novel, is not for the squeamish (or Mormons without a sense of humor). The descriptions of love-making and violence done to the flesh are pretty graphic. Shed is a clear-eyed, unflinching observer, after all; and if someone is going to have her legs amputated, Shed is going to report the dismembering in detail. That makes sense in terms of the character, but it can be heavy going for the sensitive."[12] The Los Angeles Times' critic noticed a resemblance between Spanbauer's novel and other novels from several years earlier which attempted to shock with sex and violence, and wondered whether the novel was "irresponsible" in the age of AIDS.[15]
Despite the generally excellent reviews, by 1999 the Chicago Tribune had called the novel "unjustly obscure".[16] The Los Angeles Times felt the book fell short of "cult" status because it came 20 years too late to be part of the free love and gay liberation movements.[15]
The book's status, and Spanbauer's reputation as an author, have both risen rapidly in the last 10 years. One reviewer noted that "Spanbauer made his mark" as an author with the novel.[17] Robert Walter, director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, quoted a portion of the novel as some of the best American writing in 1993.[18] By 2001, the novel had reached "cult" status.[3][4][6][19] One journalist called the work "an acknowledged minor classic".[3]
The book made two "best of" lists since it was published. In 1999, the Boston Phoenix announced it was the 88th best LGBTQ novel of the 20th century.[20] An organizer for the United Kingdom's Big Gay Read, a follow-up to The Big Read, noted that The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon was the one book that should be added to the first-cut list.[21]
Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman's destructive "March to the Sea". This historical novel features a coming-of-age story, with the title taken from the poem "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae", written by Ernest Dowson.
Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American novelist who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He has published 19 novels, three nonfiction books, two graphic novels, and two adult coloring books, as well as several short stories. His first published novel was Fight Club, which was adapted into a film of the same title.
Walk Two Moons is a novel written by Sharon Creech, published by HarperCollins in 1994 and winner of the 1995 Newbery Medal. The novel was originally intended as a follow-up to Creech's previous novel Absolutely Normal Chaos; but, the idea was changed after she began writing it. The book is often taught in elementary and middle schools across the world since the book is considered a classic example of what it means to judge, come to terms with loss, and connecting with the people who surround us.
Moon Tiger is a 1987 novel by Penelope Lively which spans the time before, during and after World War II. The novel won the 1987 Booker Prize. It is written from multiple points of view and moves backward and forward through time. It begins as the story of a woman who, on her deathbed, decides to write a history of the world, and develops into a story of love, incest and the desire to be recognized as an independent free thinking woman of the time.
Vardis Alvero Fisher was an American writer from Idaho who wrote popular historical novels of the Old West. After studying at the University of Utah and the University of Chicago, Fisher taught English at the University of Utah and then at the Washington Square College of New York University until 1931. He worked with the Federal Writers' Project to write the Works Project Administration The Idaho Guide, which was published in 1937. In 1939, Fisher wrote Children of God, a historical novel concerning the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The novel won the Harper Prize. In 1940, Fisher relocated to Hagerman, Idaho, and spent the next twenty years writing the 12-volume Testament of Man (1943–1960) series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cavemen to civilization. Fisher's novel Mountain Man (1965) was adapted in the film Jeremiah Johnson (1972).
Currant Events is a 2004 fantasy novel by British-American writer Piers Anthony, the twenty-eighth book of the Xanth series and the first book in the second Xanth trilogy.
Tom Spanbauer is an American writer whose work often explores issues of sexuality, race, and the ties that bind disparate people together. Raised in Idaho, Spanbauer has lived in Kenya and across the United States. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches a course titled "dangerous writing". He graduated in 1988 from Columbia University with an MFA in Fiction and has written five novels.
Rogue Moon is a short science fiction novel by Lithuanian-American writer Algis Budrys, published in 1960. It was a 1961 Hugo Award nominee. A substantially shortened version of the novel was originally published in F&SF; this novella-length story was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, edited by Ben Bova. It was adapted into a radio drama by Yuri Rasovsky in 1979.
My Side of the Mountain is a middle-grade adventure novel written and illustrated by American writer Jean George published by E. P. Dutton in 1959. It features a boy who learns courage, independence, and the need for companionship while attempting to live in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. In 1960, it was one of three Newbery Medal Honor Books (runners-up) and in 1969 it was loosely adapted as a film of the same name. George continued the story in print, decades later.
Maritta Martin Wolff Stegman was an American author.
The History of Love: A Novel is the 2005 novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss.The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction.
Bid Time Return is a 1975 science fiction novel by Richard Matheson. It concerns a man from the 1970s who travels back in time to court a 19th-century stage actress whose photograph has captivated him. In 1980, it was made into the classic sci-fi film Somewhere in Time, the title of which was used for subsequent editions of the book.
It's Superman! is a novel by Tom De Haven based on the comic book superhero Superman. It was released on September 15, 2005, in hardcover and August 29, 2006, in paperback. The premise tells the tale of Clark Kent's beginnings into becoming Superman, set in the 1930s, where Clark befriends a wrongly convicted photographer named Willi Berg, and is then taken from Kansas to Hollywood and finally in New York where he meets Lois Lane, fights Lex Luthor, as he debuts in his superhero persona. Despite the setting, this is not about the Golden Age Superman also known as the Superman of Earth-2; Perry White, the Daily Planet, Lex Luthor's position and his trademark powers are not part of that alternate Earth. Rather, it's a Superman period piece set in the 1930s.
Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who, in her teens, helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition in achieving their chartered mission objectives by exploring the Louisiana Territory. Sacagawea traveled with the expedition thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, helping to establish cultural contacts with Native American people and contributing to the expedition's knowledge of natural history in different regions.
Ida Julia Pollock was a British writer of several short-stories and over 125 romance novels that were published under her married name, Ida Pollock, and under a number of different pseudonyms: Joan M. Allen; Susan Barrie, Pamela Kent, Averil Ives, Anita Charles, Barbara Rowan, Jane Beaufort, Rose Burghley, Mary Whistler and Marguerite Bell. She sold millions of copies over her 90-year career. She has been referred to as the "world's oldest novelist" who was still active at 105 and continued writing until her death. On the occasion of her 105th birthday, Pollock was appointed honorary vice-president of the Romantic Novelists' Association, having been one of its founding members.
The Moon and the Sandals is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Fumi Yoshinaga, her debut work. Originally serialized in Hanaoto magazine, the individual chapters were collected and published in two tankōbon volumes by Houbunsha in March 1996 and February 2000, respectively. It follows the romantic relationships of high school teacher Ida, his lover, a student named Kobayashi who develops a crush on Ida and is rejected, and the fellow student whom Kobayashi comes to love afterwards.
Marilyn Durham was an American author of fiction. Her best-known novel is her first, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, which was made into a film of the same name.
Lidia Yuknavitch is an American writer, teacher and editor based in Oregon. She is the author of the memoir The Chronology of Water, and the novels The Small Backs of Children,Dora: A Headcase, and The Book of Joan. She is also known for her TED talk "The Beauty of Being a Misfit", which has been viewed over 3.2 million times, and her follow-up book The Misfit's Manifesto.
The Man of Gold is a 1984 science-fantasy novel written by M. A. R. Barker and published by DAW Books. It is the first novel set on the fictional world of Tékumel – also featured in Barker's role-playing game Empire of the Petal Throne (1974) – and tells the story of a priest of Thumis named Harsan, a scholar who becomes involved in the quest for the eponymous artefact of a past immensely ancient.
Luis Mojica is a musician & somatic therapist. He began developing his musical style in New York City's East Village. In 2012, he moved upstate to Woodstock, New York.
References
↑ Spanbauer, Tom. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. Reprint ed. New York: Grove Press, 2000. ISBN0-8021-3663-X
1 2 "Lewiston Author's Book Wins NW Award." Lewiston Morning Tribune. February 28, 1992.
↑ Norman, Brian. "Clarifying Blackness in Anglo-Native Fictions: Tom Spanbauer's Cross-Ethnic Borrowings." Canadian Review of American Studies. 40:2 (2010), p. 238; Spanbauer, Tom. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. New York: Grove Press, 2000, p. 318.
↑ Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, 2000, p. 130-133
↑ "Northwest Book Win Awards." Seattle Times. February 9, 1992; Lyke, M.L. "Documentary On Carver Pulls Off A Bold Approach." Seattle Post-Intelligencer. February 27, 1992.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
