goodreads review of Samuel R. Delany's "The Motion of Light in Water"

The Motion Of Light In Water: Sex And Science Fiction Writing In The East Village by Samuel R. Delany

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village is the story of a young writer's coming of age. The memoir is a beautifully-crafted narrative that moves back and forth in time like a tesseract... "queer temporality" in action before that jargon was coined in academia to describe it. It chronicles Delany's childhood, growing up over a funeral parlor in Harlem, his adolescence, during which he was a gifted student at Bronx Science, his early 20s, when he lived in the East Village with poet (then his wife) Marilyn Hacker, and his early struggles and successes publishing science fiction novels at Ace Books. Interspersed with vivid poetic descriptions of NYC in the late 50s and early 60s, the memoir includes numerous titillating anecdotes about Delany's queer sexual awakening, poignant erotic descriptions of the men with rough workman's hands and bitten-down fingernails who touched him, as well as whimsical tales of his interactions with literary and musical icons including W.H. Auden and Bob Dylan (Delany's name once appeared above Dylan's on a makeshift Village cafe marquee for five minutes before one of his folk gigs in the early 60s), all set in the Bohemia that once was downtown Manhattan. Outrageously fun to read is his account of his experience watching a "Happening in Six Parts," an experimental performance art piece whose structure he then borrows as a paradigm for his own storytelling (seemingly random, yet actually, perfectly organized.) Also particularly moving are his descriptions of the creations of two early experimental literary works (the 1000+ page Voyage, Orestes! and a full-length opera on which he collaborated with Lorenzo Fuller) that were both lost in the flotsam and jetsam of an ever-changing NYC (the novel was buried under rubble of a torn-down building in whose basement the manuscript had rested while he was out of town.) Though his father once strangled his childhood imaginary friend Octopus hoping to facilitate a more rapid maturation, Delany's artistic impulses could not be stifled.

The last 200 pages of the novel focuses mainly on Delany and Marilyn Hacker's long-lasting triad-relationship with Bob, a sexy homeless wanderer Delany invited to their East Village walk-up for dinner one night. The pleasurable and relatively emotionally-fulfilling domestic interlude comes to an end when Bob's wife from Florida moves to New York and into their building. Delany subsequently agrees to accompany Bob on a hitchhiking trip to Texas (they end up traveling separately to expedite rides), where the two aspire to work on fishing boats on the Gulf Coast. These passages of the memoir are reminiscent of both Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, as they feature many descriptions of the late night racist underbelly of the mid-century rural U.S., knee-high wading through muddy rainstorms, episodes of roadside exhausted collapse, and exhilarating blow-by-blow accounts of midnight conversations with strangers both benevolently Good Samaritanish and menacingly seedy.

The memoir chronicles not only the writer's personal development, but also, the growing political queer/black/feminist consciousness(es) that blossomed in the late 1960s/early 1970s in a way that brilliantly and generously avoids the alienation and isolationism that can result from strict adherence to dogmatic identity politics. (Much of this is accomplished through the inclusion of subtle details about the shifting power dynamics and various modes of nurturing that occurred within the loving and intimate relationship between Delany and Hacker, as well as numerous wisely-chosen passages of Hacker's arresting poetry, some never before published.) Most notably, it also usefully and candidly investigates both bisexuality and "interracial" relationships in a way that refreshingly shatters stereotypical binary conceptions of sexuality, race, and gender identities.

Not that it matters, but I do highly recommend this book!



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