The Tales of Patrick Merla

This slim collection was published in 1985. It contains nine stories (two of which are so short as to be negligible), puffed out with wide margins and blank pages to make up a page-count of 103. All are fairy stories, which the publisher says are "in the tradition of George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brother Grimm."  Well, maybe, but Merla's tales do not stand up well next to those by such classic authors. Edmund White, in a review of the book in the Washington Post of September 22, 1985, noted that: 

Often a Merla tale begins with a vice--pride, cruelty, greed--that is exercised with stubborn willfulness. Next a terrible fate befalls the vicious man or woman, who must then set out in a quest of atonement. After much suffering (and isolation), the voyager is forgiven and learns the error of his or her ways. 

Which is true, but White fails to account for the lack of fairy tale magic in the stories. They never engage the reader, and each story merely plods on until it reaches its end. There is no literary style, no wry modern perspective, nothing to make these routine tales stand out. John Gardner was writing such modern fairy tales (I reviewed some collections below) at the same time as Merla, yet Gardner did it much better.

Boys Like Us, edited by Patrick Merla

This book appeared in 1996, and at that time, according to the editor, it was a few decades in the making. It sounds like a good idea in itself, as expressed in the subtitle: gay writers tell their coming out stories. It collects some twenty-nine essays by acclaimed writers, plus an introduction by the editor. The first essay is by science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, and it sets a high standard that I feared the subsequent essays couldn't reach, and they didn't. Delany's essay is introspective, and deeply thoughtful, in ways that most of the rest of the essays aren't, for many descend to being not so much coming out stories (drawing individual fences around that term), but merely stories of early sexual experiences. None of them are bad, most are well-written, and if personally insightful they aren't especially revealing of the societal web of meanings for the term coming out. The second most interesting essay after Delany's is that by poet Carl Phillips, which closes the book. These essays are now almost thirty years old. It would be interesting to read an entirely new collection of similar essays on what coming out means to current writers.