Wesley Brown’s genius in this novel is to set us down in the midst of men whose interior lives, whose senses of what it is possible for them to be in this world, have been so constrained by masculinity that they cannot even begin to think of other possibilities. He holds us so close to this world that it can seem as if there is no escaping it. Melvin, whose peers nickname him Mouth because of his overenthusiastic method of smooching women, is in many ways the perfect vehicle for this portrayal: his voice brings us into a too-intimate, almost claustrophobic relationship with the anxious world of masculinity, a community of men who feel a constant need to prove their male bona fides. It is a world of rampant homophobia, misogyny, body shaming, and generalized fear of what it would mean to let one’s guard down and participate in an actually intimate relationship—not just with women, but with anybody at all. Melvin, who seems most motivated by an adolescent lust, is not exempt from this fraternity. As a result, neither is the reader. We must be careful to read this novel not as an endorsement of heteronormativity, but an attempt to honestly reckon with the toll it takes on the novel’s male characters, the way it leaves them emotionally deformed.

Among these men, Melvin’s childhood friend Otis is perhaps the most deformed. A veteran of the Vietnam War who, unlike Melvin, was driven to fight by his obsession with that paragon of American machismo, John Wayne, Otis is a young buck whose chief concerns are bedding women and demonstrating his physical prowess against other men. Quick to anger and possessed of a pride that goes only about half an inch deep, he is the Kurtz to Melvin’s Marlow. Racked by loneliness and more than a little guilt, Melvin seeks his friend out upon hearing that he’s lost a hand as a result of the war. What he finds is less a person than an open wound, a man whose notion of his identity has been fundamentally challenged by his participation in a failed war, and a more personal failure to live up to an impossible standard. Once certain that fighting would make him every bit as heroic as Wayne, Otis—now a radio engineer rather than a warrior—is straining at society’s leash, leaping at every chance he gets to prove his belonging to the lethal fraternity of American cowboys.