“We live to get hurt.” It’s an echo of his thinking from when they were 9 or 10, when Shannon left a bruise on Marion’s wrist: “We’re boys,” Shannon had said. Shannon has never had sex with a man in bed cars that haven’t been broken into probably don’t belong in Geshig received knowledge about masculinity is, for Shannon at least, intractable: “We’re guys,” he says as an adult. Their relationship–the closeted man and the patient lover–is familiar, but the specificity of Staples’ representation is poignant. Part of me does miss the smell of the lake and sweat that used to cling to him. His overall hygiene and look improved too. When we first met he only wore plain boxers with dull checkered designs but as the summer went on his attire became conspicuously smaller and more colorful. He wears tight gray boxer briefs with a shiny waistband and designer label. As Marion helps Shannon come out to himself, we see how the baby steps of acceptance present in a closeted lover: It’s fair to say that Shannon doesn’t know himself, a sad and pressurized state that Staples pushes into relief by skillfully writing Shannon’s sections in the second person. Now in their mid-20s, Marion is surprised to one day see that the man he invited over for anonymous sex was his former tormentor. Shannon was a basketball-playing jock and bullied the more insular Marion.
The author’s empathy even extends to former prom king Shannon Harstad, Marion’s childhood bully who becomes his on-off closeted lover. Staples’ empathy for the entire town makes the characters clear and urgent. The concise, thoughtful style gives characters, even when hardly physically described, emotional propulsion. Staples renders Marion in the first-person, giving the reader a vibrant intimacy to an openly gay man in a town where the majority of nearby online dating profiles are blank. Years later, the sudden murder of another teen affects everyone in the town, including Marion Lafournier, an insecure yet quietly charismatic 25-year-old.
His death, brought on by gang violence and communal depression, haunts the town in this story of violence, redemption, and self-determination. In a sparse and beautiful page-long prologue, we encounter a violent act against Kayden Kelliher, a 17-year-old Geshig High School basketball star. Staples’ debut novel This Town Sleeps (Counterpoint Press) takes place on a 667-person Minnesota reservation town named Geshig. This Town Sleeps is an Emotional Wrought Tale of Community and Redemption
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