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Brian Malloy's acclaimed debut novel set in Minneapolis in the late 70's, The Year of Ice is the story of a painfully revealing year that threatens to shatter the tenuous bonds between a father and his teenage son It is 1978 in the Twin Cities, and Kevin Doyle, a high school senior, is a marginal student in love with keggers, rock and roll, and--unbeknownst to anyone else--a boy in his class with thick eyelashes and a bad attitude. His mother Eileen died two years earlier when her car plunged into the icy waters of the Mississippi River, and since then Kevin's relationship with his father Patrick has become increasingly distant. As lonely women vie for his father's attention, Kevin discovers Patrick's own closely guarded secret: he had planned to abandon his family for another woman. More disturbingly, his mother's death may well have been a suicide, not an accident. Complicating the family dynamic is the constant meddling of Kevin's outspoken Aunt Nora--who will never forgive Patrick for Eileen's death--along with Patrick's inability to stay single for very long. His loyalties divided between his father and his aunt, between his internal reality and his public persona, Kevin is forced to accept his gay identity and reevaluate his notions of family and love as painful truths emerge about both.… (more)
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The general idea of the book is quite simple: the protagonist, Kevin Doyle, lives with his shifty lower class father after his mother died in a mysterious and sudden car accident. His relationship with his dad deteriorates as the latter gets into troublesome relationships and even more into the bottle. What makes it all worse for our Kevin is that while he is struggling to avoid the consequences and meaning of his homosexuality, it becomes increasingly clear that his dad is hiding something from him, something relating to his mother. The development of the plot is basically the interaction between these two issues on Kevin's mind, mediated by the intervention of a host of secondary characters.
There are some downsides, nevertheless. Many of the other characters in the book, in particular Kevin's good friends, only develop in the plot in their relation to Kevin but seem to have no real rounded character or development of their own. Also, Malloy has a tendency to introduce side-plots that then suddenly end again, leaving the reader wondering what the point of this was. While this makes sense in the context of a person's diary-like description of his experiences in a given time period, it's still not very strong from a plot point of view. Finally, something that struck me as a Dutchman, Malloy has for some reason seen fit to introduce some Dutch into the book and subsequently misspells and misuses almost every single Dutch word. It is not clear whether this is intentional or not, but it is certainly annoying, especially since the translations he gives are often wrong too. It's of minor importance for the book but Malloy would have done better to leave it out.
Overall, the book is surprisingly fun to read and the writing is cynical, funny and to the point. It's delightfully free of the vapidness that is so often particular to gay novels, especially about teenagers. Of course there's plenty of superficiality left, but let's be honest: that's what teenagers are usually like, gay or otherwise.
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