Book Review: A gay couple's complicated journey toward surrogacy is just the beginning of this very funny novel

I love debut novels that are packed with all the ideas an author has been waiting to express. “Something Close to Nothing” by Tom Pyun feels like one of those books. It begins as the story of a gay couple's tragicomic journey toward surrogacy, but then expands to much more.

It's no spoiler to tell you that one half of the couple, Wynn, runs away before the baby is even born. And when I say screws, I mean he physically runs out of the airport and leaves his partner, Jared, moments before boarding a flight to Cambodia for the birth of their daughter, whom they plan to name Meryl after the win. -winning actress. That memorable scene sets up many more surprising plot twists.

Told through the alternating points of view of Wynn and Jared, this is a restless novel about restless people whose American dreams are rarely fulfilled. Pyun takes us to San Francisco, Cambodia, Thailand, Connecticut, New York, Switzerland, Boston and Kenya. It begins the story in 2015, but takes us through 1995 and up to 2036, all in about 250 slim, gripping pages. This is a novel that moves quickly.

Sometimes I felt like the book was moving. also fast, that the plot twists were resolved before they had time to fully unravel. The book shines brightest when it dwells on the messes its characters create and when it takes time to examine their passions and fears. Wynn's love of dance, for example, is written with patient complexity. At the beginning, he describes his ability to “dissociate and perform the movements when necessary”: what a way to set up a character who then abandons his life to pursue his thirst for dance, which is about “the unbridled joy of being in my body.” . In this novel, dance is the opposite of dissociation. It's freedom, community, belonging: a refuge, especially for Wynn, a character in constant motion who declares early on that he “no longer wants to feel empty.”

Most important to the story Pyun tells is that Wynn wants to be a hip-hop dancer. He describes hip-hop as “resistance, especially within the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy we live in.” The novel excels in exploring the role that this patriarchy plays in shaping the vision that both characters have of themselves and their world. Wynn, a Korean-American born and raised in Connecticut, spent his first 18 years being “routinely attacked and ignored, sometimes on the same day,” by classmates and residents of his hometown. She makes two promises to herself when she graduates from college, one of which is that she “wouldn't end up with a white man.” In a brilliant moment of introspection, he later says: “The fatal flaw of this contract was its rooting in the negative. As they say, 'if you don't build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.'”

And so, Wynn ends up with a white man… one he eventually runs away from at the airport. And Jared is not just any white man, but one who imagines a future in which Wynn's elopement becomes an anecdote for the dinner guests, “a racially diverse and affluent mix of middle-aged professional couples, straight and homosexuals”.

I should note that I am a gay Iranian-American husband and father who was given the gift of our beloved children through surrogacy. Since my adolescence as an immigrant in this country, I know what it feels like to be attacked and ignored on the same day. I also know what it means to find freedom, community, and belonging through the arts. I also understand the unique pressure of wanting to be a perfect example of fatherhood in a world that still views queer fathers with suspicion. There were times in this novel when I applauded his wisdom and humor (the book is very, very funny, never more so than when we finally meet Wynn and Jared's replacement), and times when I shuddered at how selfish his main characters regarding their commitment as parents.

It's not until the thank yous, where Pyun thanks the queer friends who shared their surrogacy journeys with him, that we hear a positive story of queer fatherhood. He writes: “The happiness of their homes was not enough material for the juicy novel that I so wanted to write.” Wynn and Jared do not exist to represent perfect representations of queerness. They exist to show us that queer parents-to-be can be just as messy, confrontational, and impulsive as anyone else. Wynn might be the one physically fleeing fatherhood and praying that his surrogate changes her mind or aborts, but Jared is an equally unsuspecting father who at one point considers leaving the baby himself to start over “with a surrogate with based in California this time. .”

Ultimately, this is a novel about the dark and hilarious side of our unfulfilled American dreams. What feels most American is how full it is of ideas and energy, of rage and hope, of rash and selfish decisions that leave chaos and pain in their wake.

As Americans consider our most recent existential choices and the multiple global crises that should inspire us to confront our complicity in shaping an unjust world, “Something Close to Nothing” asks some important questions for us, as well as its characters: Will we flee? of our responsibilities towards others? Can we really help another person when we have not yet examined and accepted ourselves? And perhaps most importantly: Should we name our next child after Meryl Streep?

Abdi Nazemian is a writer whose books include the Stonewall Honor Award-winning “Like a Love Story” and the Stonewall Honor-winning and Lambda Literary Award-winning “Only This Beautiful Moment.”