REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | April 26, 2005 Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson. Harcourt, 232 pages, $23 hardcover. Neither traditional narrative drive nor overt lesbian lives are integral to Winterson's eighth novel. That this edgy, dreamy story doesn't deliver either the emotional passion of The Passion or the colorful coming-out of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, however, is no reason to pass it over. There is a narrative – about Silver, a precocious orphan girl raised by a grizzled lighthouse-keeper on Scotland's stormy Cape Wrath shore. And there is a lesbian – Silver finally finds true love after years of emotional turbulence. But Lighthousekeeping is best read as a lyrical and whimsical fable. Winterson's gorgeous prose blends together a fantastical place, where Silver is born in a house built into a hillside so steep that chairs are nailed to the floor, and an ageless time, where her adventures intersect with novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, a 19th-century pastor bigamist, and a parrot in Capri. "A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that method," Winterson writes in Silver's voice. That's an apt summation of this imaginative work. Light Before Day, by Christopher Rice. Hyperion Books, 325 pages, $23.95 hardcover. Alcoholic blackouts, methamphetamine addiction, West Hollywood partyboy narcissism, porn stars and their pimps, lost teens with hard bodies and babyfat faces, and, most horrifically, sadistic child prostitution: the tangled tale told in Light Before Day is bleak and vicious. Aspiring journalist Adam, adrift in his dissolute mid-20s, is at its center. Bored with writing paeans to underwear models for Glitz magazine, he's drawn to the story of a Marine helicopter pilot who commits suicide days after visiting West Hollywood – a suicide soon entangled with the suspicious disappearance of Adam's former boyfriend; with the threatening machinations of a twinkie who mysteriously inherited his sugar daddy's dot-com millions; with a sarcastic straight mystery writer who takes Adam under his wing; and with the brutal, messy world of rural meth labs. There are layers upon layers in this textured thriller, and so many intersecting characters that alert reading is imperative – and a flow chart would help. Rice's third novel is darker and less flamboyant than either A Density of Souls or The Snow Garden – and, in tackling themes of hustling, pedophilia, and addiction, much more ambitious. Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame, by Michael Joseph Gross. Bloomsbury USA, 239 pages, $23.95 hardcover. Author Gross was starstruck at a tender age. A lonely teen, his unarticulated queer life still ahead of him, he spent hours every day after school soliciting signed letters from the famous, amassing a collection of more than 4,000: Madonna and Dr. Seuss, an astronaut who walked on the moon, Ronald Reagan and Deng Xiaoping. He's all grown up now, comfortably gay in the company of the stars he interviews; still a fan at heart, still entranced by celebrity, he's also thoughtful about the carnival that surrounds fame. His reporting on autograph-hall conventions, where faded TV and film actors sell their penmanship to adoring fans, perfectly captures the uneasy blend of adulation and melancholy that permeates the events. His visit to the homage-stuffed home of two men kitschily devoted to Dolly Parton is both tender and creepy. And his exploration of how today's young stars handle the demands of autograph hounds is tinged with regret that a once-passionate pursuit has been reduced by eBay to mere commerce. Starstruck, at times gossipy and hilarious, is an insider's chirpy but solid sociology about obsession. The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Marriage, Equality, and Rights, by Richard D. Mohr. Columbia University Press, 142 pages, $22.95 hardcover. Mohr, an American professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, was quickly caught up in the excitement of legal gay marriage: he and his partner of a quarter century were wed in Ontario mere months after that Canadian province sanctioned same-sex ceremonies in 2003. That they were able to get married – somewhere – is a linchpin of this eloquent articulation of what gays deserve from American society. But Mohr's optimistic perspective – his "long arc" – goes well beyond the immediate. Chapters on progress in civil rights, sexual privacy, social equality, queer marriage, and gays in the military are all rooted in his belief that, even if incrementally, mainstream America's acknowledgment of gay reality is evolving for the better. Implicit is his sensible observation that the real battleground for gays is not so much legal, political, or even particularly activist. Progress lies on the cultural front, Mohr believes: "Change the culture and political forms will, in general and in the long run, follow suit." He doesn't specifically favor Will & Grace – thank goodness – but even something as slight as that show is part of a promising big picture. Featured Excerpt: If I had not seen her again that day in London, perhaps my life would have been very different. I waited a month for our next meeting and I thought of nothing else that month. As soon as we were together, she turned round and asked me to unhook her dress. There were twenty hooks. I remember counting them all. She stepped out of her dress and uncoiled her hair and kissed me. She was so free with her body. Her body, her freedom. I was afraid of how she made me feel. – from Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson Footnotes: NEW YORK POET Edward Field is the 2005 recipient of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, to be bestowed at a May 10 ceremony in Manhattan; Michael Kearns (Lifetime Achievement) and Jorge Ignacio Cortinas (Emerging Artist) receive the Robert Chesley Playwriting Award; and an institution – the Lesbian Herstory Archives, founded in 1974 in the Upper West Side apartment pantry of Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel – is honored with the Publishing Triangle Leadership Award. The Publishing Triangle, an association of queer publishers, editors, publicists, and authors, also presents annual fiction, nonfiction, and poetry awards; for those nominees and other information: www.publishingtriangle.org… THE GOOD NEWS: Comedian Margaret Cho, a good friend to queers, has signed to write two young-adult novels for HarperCollins; the first, I Hate Girls, coming in 2006, tackles two topics Cho draws on for her own comedy – body image and sexual orientation… THE WHO-CARES NEWS: Political strategist Mary Cheney, no great friend of activist queers, is writing a memoir for Republican Mary Matalin's new conservative book imprint for Simon & Schuster, Threshold. Among topics to be discussed is what the lesbian daughter of VP Dick Cheney thought about being "a political target" in the 2004 election. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks