Cover artist Mia Wolff Publication date 1994 OCLC 30629151 | Language English Originally published 1994 Genre Novel | |
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Country United States and United Kingdom Publisher Richard Kasak Books/Masquerade Books Countries United States of America, United Kingdom Nominations Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Mystery Similar Through the Valley of the Ne, Times Square Red - Tim, They Fly at Çiron, Dark Reflections, Phallos | ||
The Mad Man is a sexually drenched literary novel by Samuel R. Delany, first published in 1994 by Richard Kasak. In a disclaimer that appears at the beginning of the book, Delany describes it as a "pornotopic fantasy". It was originally published in 1994, republished and slightly revised in 1996, and republished again with significant changes in 2002 and again in an e-book version with further corrections in 2015. Delany considers the 2015 version the definitive edition.
Contents
Plot summary
In New York City in the early 1980s, John Marr, a black gay graduate student, is researching a dissertation on Timothy Hasler, a Korean-American philosopher and academic stabbed to death under unexplained circumstances outside a gay bar in 1973. As details emerge, Marr finds his lifestyle converging with that of Hasler, and he becomes increasingly involved in intense sexual encounters with homeless men, despite his growing awareness of the risks of HIV.
Major themes
The Mad Man, spanning 501 pages in its first hardcover edition, is Delany's longest and most ambitious novel since Dhalgren (1975). As such, it combines a number of perspectives: a realistic portrayal of academic research, New York street life and both pre- and post-HIV gay activity, as well as explicit portrayals of fellatio, coprophilia, urophilia, and mysophilia. It also contains magic realist elements, such as the bull-like monster that appears in Marr's nightmares. Also, it employs autobiographical aspects distinctive to Delany's work, having to do with his more recent life as an academic. The relationship between the intellectual Marr and a street person, Leaky Sowps, mirrors those in many of his previous novels, as well as his real-life partnership of 17 years (as of 2007) with Dennis Rickett, formerly homeless for six years, before they met. Scenes in The Mad Man occur during "wet night" at the Mineshaft, a gay bar that actually existed in New York's meat-packing district in the '70s and '80s and indeed held such a monthly event. Other scenes detail visits to the pornographic movie theaters in the 42nd Street area, where much gay activity occurred from the sixties until they were shut down in the mid-nineties. Marr writes letters to friends containing passages that are verbatim transcripts of actual letters Delany wrote at the time; some of the originals are collected in his 1984: Selected Letters (Voytant, 2000). As such, the novel has great value as a gay history of the passage between the seventies and nineties in New York, as well as portrayals of the complex and changing attitudes towards AIDS by sexually active gay men over those years.