Aaron Krach's Half-Life
A Review by Dan Callahan
10/14/2004
Aaron Krach's first novel, Half-Life, is a simple love story that dares to take its time and get the sometimes listless feel of reality. It also dares to present a love story between a Adam, young boy, and Jeff, an older policeman, that never feels creepy or prurient, even though their relationship begins after Adam loses his father. Half-Life takes place in a fictionalized Los Angeles suburb, slow moving, glittering and cheerfully cheerless.
Krach himself grew up in Los Angeles, and he's been in New York for ten years, working as an editor for various publications (he's now a Senior Editor at Cargo magazine). "I studied art at school, then moved into film and video," says Krach. "When I came to New York, I didn't know anybody, and I didn't have any resources, so writing was the easiest creative outlet for me." Photography was also a simple creative outlet for Krach, who has had many shows at various galleries, the latest of which, Beautiful and Transcendent at the Leslie Lohman Gallery, runs through October 16th. "It runs the gamut from flowers to...naked men," laughs Krach, of the show.
His novel has been seven years in the making. "I started Half-Life when I was 25," says the 32 year-old Krach. "I thought if I turned 25 and hadn't done anything that I would be a lost cause. So I wrote the whole first draft in the three months before I turned 25. Three or four hours every night. There were probably three good years of revising after that. I was always trying to pare it down, cut it, make it more straightforward. Make it more Hemingway-esque, for lack of a better word. Sometimes I wish I had cut more."
Krach sees the book as a sort of idealized "what if?" autobiography. His mother is clinically depressed and tried to kill herself. Adam's father, also clinically depressed, does kill himself in the book. "So for me, it was a 'what if' situation," says Krach. "I had a boyfriend in high school who was also my best friend. I didn't have a group of friends and I always wanted that. So I created them."
Krach has a lot to say about the book's taboo central relationship, which he has managed to make so sweet. "I enjoy that taboo that gay men have that we're looking for our fathers in our boyfriends," he says. "Straight women are sort of pigeon-holed in the same way. I was trying to play with that a bit, and make it overt. They're both looking, they're both searching for some sort of connection. I had plenty of relationships with older men when I was younger, and it was always a connection that was mental and physical and mixed up. I wanted it to replicate that. It's far more common than anybody admits." It's in the common, small quotidian details of his narrative that Krach finds his shy lyricism, making Half-Life into a rare blend of fantasy and day to day waiting, setting the two side by side; it's in their overlap that magic occurs.
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 10/14/2004
