Sean Hewitt is the award-winning Irish poet author of the Laural Award winning collection “Tongues of Fire” as well as a biographer (J.M. Synge) His 2022 memoir “All Down Darkness Wide” is quite possibly destined to be considered a classic of GLBTQ literature. It is a self-portrait of his relationship and passionately rough breakup with his boyfriend Elias who was suffering from a mental illness and addiction.
In “All Down Darkness Wide,” he describes everything he went through- emotionally, sexually, and intellectually—but manages also to offer narrative objectivity and soul-searching truth. Hewitt narrates their story together as he wends his way through an historic cemetery in Liverpool that also happen to be a notorious cruising ground for gay men. In contrast, Hewitt’s “Open Heaven’,” his first novel, is a tale of unrequited love, though you’re never quite sure what happens behind the barn door.
James, a middle-aged gay man returns to his remote English village, with a flood of vivid unforgotten memories of coming out to his parents, his school, and his neighbors. It is a bittersweet interior portrait of loneliness, past and present. Not to give anything away, but this is about sensitive story about a depressed gay teen trying to find his place in the world. It unfolds as a remembrance of romantic and sexy things past, the year a stranger is the temporary lodger at a nearby farm owned by friends of James’ parents. The story unfolds over each season building up to a hookup between James and Luke.
As a lonely teenager James’ parents see that he is depressed and isolated but do not know how to help him. James’ feeling of loneliness is acute. To cope, he lives in his own gay fantasy world, falling in love and/or lusting after schoolmates with whom he is forced to play rugby with, even though he now feels emotionally exposed, grappling with moments of clarity, admitting
“Mostly, I found that the world outside the closet required me to keep the armor on. I traded my first closet for a bigger, roomier one.”
This intriguing revelation is one that many GLBTQ people of a certain age experienced after coming out, before the broad cultural visibility, not to mention legal protections (at least for the moment) we now have in place.
To help his son, James’ father gets him a job with Mr. Hyde, the local dairy farmer, on his milk delivery rounds to doorsteps in the village and to neighboring farms. Hyde’s wayward nephew Luke is staying on his farm because his own father is in legal trouble and his mother is having an affair with another man in France.
When James sees him one day, it is love and lust at first sight. They become casual friends, and things start to heat up. There is jock homoeroticism, familial bonding and even a night with the school gang at Ruby’s retro disco as James navigates through fantasy and late-adolescent social activity. James works up the courage to try to signal (ambiguously) to Luke that he likes him and would like to take it further. In his fantasies he is already having sex with him. Hewitt recounts their romantic encounters but Hewitt jump cuts after some smoldering (Austin-esque) buildups, and the narrative secrets are kept on ice.
Hewitt is a dynamic, lyrical writer and one gets the sense he is experimenting with form and perspective in this novel. The narrative hook is not knowing if Luke, the swarthy, earthy object of James affection, is straight, gay, bi-curious, all or none of the above.
This is Hewett’s first novel and leans on nuance— leaving readers to fill in some narrative blanks. It reminds you of a 50s closeted love story starring any number of eligible actors. Hewitt is going for something more of course, perhaps in contrast to the intimacies he revealed in “All Down Darkness Wide.” Still, as with his memoir, Hewitt is a captivating lyrical writer. In “Open Heart,” the style upstages the unconsummated drama. However dodgy the narrative, I look forward to Hewitt’s next book.
