The Boyfriend Experience: A Review of Curtis Garner’s Isaac
“As long as one suffers, one lives.”
—Graham Green
With the sheer variety at our disposal, dating apps offer endless narrative possibilities, each with their unique ads, attributes, and algorithms. It doesn’t take long to download an app and fill out the information required to construct a profile; certain apps (Grindr, for instance) require very little, meaning you have full control over how much of yourself you give to others and can expect to receive in return. Actively participating on a dating app can feel like reducing yourself to a set of facts—age, race, height, weight—while being urged to earnestly articulate your desires: your position, fetishes, your HIV status, and whether or not you take PrEP. What happens next is literally in your hands: messages, taps, pictures, blocks, sharing locations, and, should you so decide, leaving the realm of the phone screen to meet in person.
Dating apps, then, neutralize their participants, presenting them on the same plane; for gay and queer men, Grindr can often be the only avenue to freely encounter one another beyond the strictures of a hetero-dominant world, producing unprecedented connections.
In an essay for The New York Times from 2023, the critic Jennifer Wilson noticed a rising trend in literary fiction that uses dating apps as narrative agents. From Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts to Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Wilson identified how apps can function as plot devices, facilitating “encounters among characters who might not otherwise come into contact by virtue of differences in age, race or class.” Dating apps, then, neutralize their participants, presenting them on the same plane; for gay and queer men, Grindr can often be the only avenue to freely encounter one another beyond the strictures of a hetero-dominant world, producing unprecedented connections. At the same time as a user may risk their safety by meeting a stranger, what they also risk is to have their world expand: to change their life.
At the start of Curtis Garner’s debut novel Isaac, the titular protagonist—an introverted, literary, openly-gay high school senior in London—is keen on losing his virginity. Horny and restless, he scrolls through Grindr between classes, scrutinizing profiles in search of the perfect initiator. “When are you going to get it over with?” his best friend, Cherish, asks during one of their ritualistic cigarette chats. Increasingly attuned to his surroundings, Isaac, in heat, latches to the observations that turn him on, lubricating the gears of his subconscious. “His nipples were visible through his shirt and he had a wide chest and thick thighs,” he thinks of his teacher, Mr. Rooke, who figures prominently in his sexual imagination, and whose presence at a local pool produces the image of him “slicing through the water as precisely as scissors through paper, the pool’s blue mosaic tiles reflecting glittery pixels of sunlight over his body.” In Garner’s romantic hands, these descriptions, written in limited third-person omniscience, often take on the glow of a Hockney painting, the heat of a Guadagnino film, the tenderness of a CockyBoys scene.
As he becomes more involved in his new online connections and addicted to the thrills of anonymous sex, Isaac fumbles in his attempts to untie these existential knots and discover the language to understand them.
As he ventures into this period of heated sexual discovery, Isaac translates his arousals and agonies into writing. He discovers a primal passion for collecting the details of his life and transforming them into veiled fictions which Mr. Rooke encourages him to submit to literary magazines. In one such story, about a couple forced to talk to each other during a three-hour flight delay, Isaac imports insights from his personal experiences, elevating a situation into a story through flowery style and a queer sensibility. Isaac’s constant, obsessive, introverted interpretations lead him toward complex, extended explorations of his body dysmorphia and turbulent relationship with shame. “He wanted to be with men whose bodies were nothing like his,” Garner writes “craving the hair, the muscle, the assuredness and control of someone in their 30s or 40s rather than a fumble with someone as awkward, self-conscious, and recognizable as himself … He liked submitting to aggressive delusions of masculinity, of men breaking their own rules,” including, along the way, his own. As he becomes more involved in his new online connections and addicted to the thrills of anonymous sex, Isaac fumbles in his attempts to untie these existential knots and discover the language to understand them.
The novel is most engrossing in its sequences of erotic action, where, Isaac feels, “being wanted became a hunger.” We watch him bottom for the first time and discover the “new narcotic quality to the agony, a pledging of allegiance to what he was,” then suffer the experience of being blocked. We see how he reacts when a masculine-presenting tax auditor, who reveals feminizing kinks, causes him to lash out: “You’re a fucking embarrassment,” he says, having shed his initial naivete and intense self-awareness. So swiftly, then, we witness the caterpillar, through fucking, grow into a butterfly, whose fate, naturally, is to be pinned down. Enter Harrison: a 28-year-old gallery curator who appears from a thicket of nude men at an orgy “like a dying Christ” and who “had a dignity when he spoke, a defiance, like a child convinced fiercely of his own independence.” Harrison is a walking red flag made up of curated cliches: he carries a MoMA tote bag, wears Le Labo perfume, uses Aesop soap, and rolls his own cigarettes. Even the walls of his apartment, which Isaac later discovers is paid for by Harrison’s allegedly estranged mother, oozes with pretension, adorned with framed Francis Bacon paintings whose imagery causes Isaac “to imagine someone doing this to his own body—taking him apart and reshaping him, then piecing him back together.”
Predictably, as the variation of online hook-ups exhausts itself and their hazards turn repetitive, Isaac becomes besotted with Harrison, so much so that, even before their first date, he has already imagined their future together and announced to his over-bearing yet supportive mother that they are dating. Like many an anxious lover, Isaac waters the seeds of possibility planted by the presence (and intermittent interest) of his beloved, who comes to represent everything he is not but desperately wants to be, and who lives in a world he is “privy to but not part of.” It is through Harrison, then, that Isaac, no longer interested in the headless, chiseled torsos awaiting his response on Grindr, can begin to close that gap; to be dragged, in his own words, “out of the puniness of his own life,” for better or worse.
Harrison is a walking red flag made up of curated clichés: he carries a MoMA tote bag, wears Le Labo perfume, uses Aesop soap, and rolls his own cigarettes.
Issac satisfies the expectations of a debut coming-of-age novel, full of metaphors born of detailed observation (“their leather cracked like eczema”) and purple aphorisms that can often verge on redundancy (“sometimes the only way to perceive meaning was through meaninglessness”). But Garner also decidedly steers past the fatigued beats of the “coming out” novel. Whether Isaac’s mother or peer group accept his sexuality is a non-issue (they do), and his on-going struggle with his body image is a refreshing lens through which Garner explores his protagonist’s psychological distress. In tracking his progression from tepid virgin to insatiable sexpert, it comes as no surprise that Harrison functions as an inevitable destination. Isaac’s old life recedes into the background as he learns what it is like to be a partner in a more expansive sense, beyond the carnal bliss. But rather than have Isaac lose himself in his new relationship, Garner subverts this expectation, emphasizing the beauty and importance of his “puny” life, in which Cherish, Mr. Rooke, and his family become just as rich sources of meaning-making.
Notably, Garner uses the elements at hand to depict a pressing issue within the queer community: a pattern of intimate partner violence that develops and intensifies beyond the other’s control and awareness. What begins as Harrison poking fun at Isaac’s belly to pressure him into sex soon turns to physical abuse. “Don’t make out that I violated you,” he says, then adds: “Why do you always have to be the little victim?” Whether Isaac will ultimately be able to see past his fierce attachment to Harrison is the question around which the novel turns. “Isaac had put up with so much because he thought he and Harrison were special,” Garner writes near the novel’s end, “but seeing the quiet, small fact of Harrison now made him wish they’d never met.” Not only does Garner remove Harrison from the pedestal on which Isaac had placed him, he shows the destruction of the pedestal itself through Isaac’s process of unlearning, where regret and resentment become paths to revelation.
The novel’s edges soften when Isaac exits the orbit of his fraught relationship with Harrison to take a breath, to get some distance from the eye of the storm. In a scene at the beach with his mother, whose infantilizing brand of love has been at odds with his desire for independence, they unexpectedly grow closer: “They watched each other smoke, as if it were an act previously unheard of, prohibited, and Isaac felt again like a new layer of their relationship had been uncovered.” Or, toward the end, after he returns from a stay at the hospital, when Cherish, whose friendship had threatened to disintegrate when she offered him critical advice, helps bathe him. Throughout, it is Cherish’s self-assuredness and charisma that Isaac most admires and attempts to emulate. That their lives are heading in different directions renders this scene bittersweet, as their adolescent friendship faces the inevitability of change. “She made him feel a little less lonely, which he now realized he’d feared only because loneliness had no parameters,” he thinks. “She let some light in.”
If you’re lucky, on the other side of dating liberally is the gift of being able to look back on your experiences with new knowledge. Suddenly, feet on the evergreen grass, you may find yourself equipped with a history of lovers, a vocabulary of pleasure, of signs to look out for and symbols to be attracted to, of scars from curable diseases and prescriptions to prevent them from happening again, married men to avoid when strolling the aisles of Costco. To have made these connections is a way of inscribing yourself on the world: here is where I went on a first date; that was where I lost my virginity; this is where that Daddy who knew how to hit the P-spot used to live; there is where we went clubbing before we got too old for it.
It is an example of what writing can achieve: redeeming an experience by having the last word, anchoring the grief and the glory, capturing the nuanced moments in between the action.
Dating is a form of storytelling: both in the act of it, where we divulge anecdotes from our lives, and after-the-fact, when every date becomes a chapter of your life. As monogamy’s relevance wanes and polyamory is on the rise, our attachments are constantly being redefined, kept fresh, remaining forever anew. As Wilson suggests, there are so many cultural productions yet to be spawned from this technology; Isaac is one of several.
“Why write at all when the writer knew nothing about himself, when he’d given so much of himself away that there was little left,” Isaac wonders at the novel’s end. The story itself has already suggested an answer: because that state of unknowing is the site from which fiction springs, where words can grasp onto the thoughts and feelings that pass through us during periods of immense change. Isaac intimately captures the pangs of queer adolescence and the tribulations of modern gay dating in a propulsive bildungsroman where the experience of a dysregulated nervous system makes an artist out of a promising young man. It is an example of what writing can achieve: redeeming an experience by having the last word, anchoring the grief and the glory, capturing the nuanced moments in between the action. “His writing felt so close to him but so separate once he was finished,” Isaac thinks. “It was representative of him, but it was not him. It stood on its own.” It does indeed: lasciviously, sentimentally, and with a whole heart.
