The first time you read Hilton Als, it’s a revelation; the kind that comes, at most, just once a year. You wonder where this guy has been all your life. As an critic and essayist (he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism last year, and is the New Yorker’s chief theatre critic) he is both a startlingly insightful intellectual and a friendly, open discloser of generous frankness.
That he is a true heavyweight, whose language is often academic, and whose frame of reference is as wide as it is deep (Flannery O’Connor, Jean Michel Basquiat, Malcolm X, Eminem) should not put off the reader who is not au fait with critical studies. His constant striving to connect personally with his audience, to freely admit his own failings and investigate his personal longings, makes him as approachable, and enjoyable, as his flawed subjects.
In his new collection, White Girls, Als is on top form. It’s typical of his approach, unusually inward looking for a literary critic, that his take on much-scrutinised artists still provides new insights and surprises. The gay, black, American son of Caribbean immigrants, Als is fascinated by ‘otherness’ but also by unexpected ‘twinships’ which he finds in the most unlikely places.
What makes Als compelling is the sheer dazzling brilliance of his writing; visceral and poetic, big-hearted, hot-headed and fierce
The first, long, piece in White Girls is the story of his obsessive relationship with a straight man with whom he has spent three decades discussing family, art and philosophy, and whom he emulates and reveres with an almost pathetic neediness (“I was always starving for him”). He writes of ‘SL’ with a devotional detail few of us will ever enjoy from a partner, throwing out the kind of profound observations that only a born writer is capable of. In fact, his truest twinship is with writing itself, that great mirror and validator. He is ‘half living life so I can get down to really living it by writing about it.’
The opening feature – autobiographical, confessional – is unique within the collection. But it very effectively introduces the cool, likeable, edifying voice which will guide us through the following, ostensibly more standard, essays. Als tosses around references to high art and pop culture as liberally as he draws upon his own experience, and that of his friends and family.
It is the authenticity of his voice, as well as his finding connections uncommon among black male journalists (not many dream of having Courtney Love album tracks accompany them down the aisle) which make him so compelling. That, and the sheer dazzling brilliance of his writing; visceral and poetic, big-hearted, hot-headed and fierce. In the end I just wanted to hang out with him, soak his enormous personality in, go to the movies with him and play him some tunes. Some guy, some doll.
