Brian Leung, World Famous Love Acts. Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande Books, 2004. $14.95 paper (ISBN 1-889330-16-7), 201 pages.

Reviewed by Crystal S. Thomas

However ironic, there is a noose pictured on the cover of Brian Leung’s debut collection, World Famous Love Acts, which juxtaposed as it is with the large, capitalized title seems to suggest one can expect macabre tales about the enigmatic nature of suicide. This is only half true. Leung’s stories do depict characters occupying rueful positions, but the dramatic cover image of a rope is also metaphorical for the decisions that life and our relationships inevitably force us to: We can hang on or let go, both choices often equally bittersweet, a reality that Leung’s collection captures accurately. The bored and cynical narrator of “Drawings by Andrew Warhol,” a thirty-something, grocery store manager who is manipulated by an overzealous customer, asks, “When, if ever, do you see who you are becoming?” This question serves as almost a treatise for the collection. Through the naiveté of compelling first-person narrators and lonely, central characters that range from a Chinese egg farmer to a man dying of AIDS, Leung illustrates how complicated negotiations of individuality and sexuality can be and how our communal maladroit in these areas result in strained relationships.

Metaphor abounds in Leung’s eleven stories as characters engage in symbolic acts that demonstrate the difficulty and necessity of communication. In an early story in the book, “Executing Dexter,” two young boys torture and kill crudely constructed “babies” during their after school play-time. This game comes to represent the boys’ unspoken desires as Herschel, a chubby African American boy, narrates his admiration for his handsome Native American playmate and questions his filial relationship to dispassionate parents. Through a string of flashbacks, the reminiscent Herschel reveals how these morbid enactments reflect his defiance of a father only concerned with success and “good execution,” as well as his best friend’s ambivalence about a prospective new sibling. Sincerely narrated as innocent play, the baby killings become a point of connection for the boys and, later, a symbol of an unarticulated need for expiation. In a final moment in which the boys decide to save the baby from which the title derives, Herschel says simply, “To us, at that moment, Dexter was real and human and we had to rescue him... with each pull of the line...we felt like we were saving ourselves.” In this unpredictable and poignant story, the resolution comes across as truthfully as the adolescent characters themselves.

Leung does an excellent job of endowing his narrators with distinct, believable voices and portrays them with an empathy that makes their naïve persistence, and even moral posturing, engaging. In the title story, “World Famous Love Acts,” two lovers embark on a road trip during which the self-proclaimed clairvoyant narrator tries to ignore his intuition that it will be their last. The story reads like a love letter, fluctuating between first and second person and making the reader privy to a mostly internal address that recounts an earlier, fervent sex life, even as present scenes expose the inability of the long-term partners to continue to connect. “I look into your eyes,” the narrator, nicknamed Bit, confesses, but a potential moment of passion deflates when he is unable to remember how to arouse his lover, too “afraid to do the wrong thing.”

The culmination of the road trip is supposed to be an immersion into New Orleans erotica at a sex show that Bit imagines will refresh the relationship. While he does come to see the simplicity of this hope, he does not yet realize his sexual evolution independent of his lover’s affections. It is this subtly rendered irony that compels empathy with Bit as well as accedence to the broader maxim his lover shares, that “sometimes love isn’t a good enough excuse to stay together.”

Precise and graceful, the language in World Famous Love Acts depicts settings that provide a rich backdrop and highlight Leung’s characters’ isolation. The waterfall introduced in the first story, “blue as an unraveling bolt of satin,” is the sight of both commercial promises and suicide tragedies. In “Fire Walk: An Old-Fashioned AIDS Story,” the smell of a breeze changing directions is “buttery and toxic like a serum for fever.” “Leases” tells the story of a man whose wife has asked him to surrender an apartment where he has regularly seduced male lovers. When he steps onto the apartment’s balcony for the last time, he contemplates the sky, wrestling with the finality that his acquiescence portends: “Larkin did not believe in this solid slate. He looks for possible breaches, doorways into the mesh of indigo atoms. Of course, the flaw would be to find one.” Having noted how the great views in Los Angeles are completely manufactured, Larkin resolves himself to embrace a marriage that has been, for the most part, tolerably constructed.

Although several of the endings may seem heavy-handed, this is a sharply written string of stories, as diverse and compact as a well-stocked cabinet. Expect skillful characterization, keen dialogue, and to be surprised by humor from unexpected sources. Leung’s collection strikes the appropriate balance between regret and reverie; it sounds awareness for the possibilities of human connection and agilely swings somewhere between a lament and a love song.