Ponyboy

April 24, 2023
Duncan’s triumphant and visceral debut follows a trans-masculine narrator wrestling with gender identity and drug use. Ponyboy, an American living in Paris, takes refuge in the consoling presence of Toni, a trans-woman childhood friend, while his girlfriend, Baby, is out of town. He also drinks heavily and uses cocaine, ketamine, molly, and whatever else he can get his hands on, yearning to be seen as a man (Baby would prefer him as a butch woman). A love triangle develops upon Baby’s return, after she takes an interest in a man who assaulted Ponyboy. As Ponyboy slides deeper into addiction, he becomes alienated from the friends who are trying to help him. The swirling narrative eventually finds Ponyboy back home in the Midwest for rehab, then with family in Vienna, and back in Paris, where he summons the courage to be himself. Duncan’s writing can be indulgent—“Only a poet’s voice will do. This is The Angel Natalie’s. Coming here, wings long and true”—but he makes up for it with sinewy descriptions of Ponyboy’s transition (“My movements are welding into a smoother, masculine strut”) and by channeling Ponyboy’s ache to transform (“I wanna make loud the parts they strangle,” he writes in an email to real-life trans activist author Paul Preciado). Though a bit messy at times, this rings true.

May 1, 2023
A troubled protagonist deals with addiction and his own becoming in this expressive bildungsroman. This novel in four parts begins in a Paris bathroom, where the titular protagonist is getting a haircut from his best friend and flinching at the sight of his own breasts. Ponyboy and Toni "grew up and over and out of Iowa, together," discovering their true genders alongside each other. With Toni, Ponyboy feels like himself--or at least something close to the self he longs to be. But to his girlfriend, Baby--a lesbian--his masculinity is a problem that they may not be able to resolve. Everyone involved in this m�nage drinks a lot of alcohol and snorts a lot of coke, and for Ponyboy, substance abuse is a conscious attempt to escape the difficulty of being himself. His use reaches a crisis point in Berlin--where the second part of the book is set--which sends him into recovery and back to his family. The narrative is interspersed with scenes from his Midwestern youth and oddments like a letter to Sigmund Freud's patient Dora and imagined conversations with Kathy Acker. During the first parts of the novel, Duncan deploys an arduously metaphorical style that veers from the sublime to the cartoonish. "I lose my body exceptionally" is a gorgeously economical way to describe the way Ponyboy feels liberated from his physical reality while wasted. On the other hand, "My cock-intelligence smolders in my furrowed brow" is a bit hard to take. "Back arched aching in solar want. My teeth pull on the meat of an olive." This is an excerpt from a text sent to Baby. A very long text. An unsent email message to writer and philosopher Paul Preciado is similarly overwrought. But, as Ponyboy moves toward and through rehab, Duncan chooses a plain style that allows his protagonist to emerge as real and true--and alive. Technically ambitious, often trying, and ultimately rewarding.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
Ah, La Vie Boh�me. Ponyboy (requiescat in pace, S. E. Hinton), our twentysomething protagonist, is studying philosophy in Paris while living with his girlfriend, Baby, who is a lesbian. As for Ponyboy, who is trans, he pops so many pills and drinks so much alcohol of various types that readers may feel they need to go into rehab with him. When he manages to complete his degree, he and Baby move to Berlin, where she paints and he struggles to write while vigorously feeding his various addictions. When he meets Daniel, another would-be writer, he falls in love ("My blood chimes in the syncopated notes of my heart"), although Daniel, like him, has a girlfriend for whom he will ultimately leave Ponyboy. This drives him into even more addictive behavior until--no surprise--he almost overdoses, which brings his father to Berlin to send Ponyboy back home to the Midwest to go into rehab. But will he stay there? Duncan's first novel, inspired in part by his own life, is occasionally a challenging read: Ponyboy's first-person voice can be opaque and his story overwritten. Nevertheless, there are lovely turns of phrase ("Her eyes held hot planets"), and Ponyboy grows increasingly empathetic, while his sometimes- melancholy story, like his habit, in the end proves to be addictive. A first novelist to watch very closely.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.