Justin Torres Finds Inspiration in the Erasures of Queer History
Any sense of anonymity that Justin Torres had enjoyed as an author was on the verge of vanishing. Shortly before the release of his debut novel, “We the Animals,” in 2011, critics were starting to praise him and his slim, semi-autobiographical book about childhood, family and sexuality.
Overnight, he was considered an authority. Just as quickly, impostor syndrome set in. “I suddenly kind of got thrust into the world,” Torres, 43, said during a recent video interview. “I was being asked my thoughts about queer literature and Latinx literature, as if I had some kind of expertise.” Getting started on his next novel was a helpful distraction.
But whatever that was, Torres knew, it wouldn’t come quickly. “‘We the Animals’ was everything I had in my 20s,” he said. “And it takes a while to refill the well.” A dozen years later, Torres’s follow-up has arrived: “Blackouts,” which Farrar, Straus & Giroux published this week.
A dreamy novel that unfurls among mixed media and Socratic dialogues, moving freely between fact and fiction as it proposes and complicates questions about how history is made, it bears almost no surface-level resemblance to “We the Animals.” “In some ways it’s the literary equivalent of a PJ Harvey album,” the author Alexander Chee said of Torres’s new book. “It just felt so perfectly aligned with his talents and his imagination and the worlds he has access to, even as it also seemed to just be so much its own creature: a kind of deep conversation with elements of our queer history and queer past, especially here in America, that I don’t think we’ve really come to terms with.” In other words, Torres is bound to be considered an authority all over again.
