The Long Shot

by Paul Monette

A powerful and haunting novel set amidst the glamour and sadness of Hollywood follows Greg Cannon, a screenwriter who has one incredible night of passion with Harry Dawes, a man he could fall in love with, who then dies, along with a famous Hollywood actor, in what appears to be a double suicide, but Greg has other suspicions and sets out to find the truth. Reprint.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Contemporary

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Online Guide to Paul Monette's papers at UCLA:
http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/...

In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.

Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1945. He was educated at prestigious schools in New England: Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University, where he received his B.A. in 1967. He began his prolific writing career soon after graduating from Yale. For eight years, he wrote poetry exclusively.

After coming out in his late twenties, he met Roger Horwitz, who was to be his lover for over twenty years. Also during his late twenties, he grew disillusioned with poetry and shifted his interest to the novel, not to return to poetry until the 1980s.

In 1977, Monette and Horwitz moved to Los Angeles. Once in Hollywood, Monette wrote a number of screenplays that, though never produced, provided him the means to be a writer. Monette published four novels between 1978 and 1982. These novels were enormously successful and established his career as a writer of popular fiction. He also wrote several novelizations of films.

Monette's life changed dramatically when Roger Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s. After Horwitz's death in 1986, Monette wrote extensively about the years of their battles with AIDS (Borrowed Time, 1988) and how he himself coped with losing a lover to AIDS (Love Alone, 1988). These works are two of the most powerful accounts written about AIDS thus far.

Their publication catapulted Monette into the national arena as a spokesperson for AIDS. Along with fellow writer Larry Kramer, he emerged as one of the most familiar and outspoken AIDS activists of our time. Since very few out gay men have had the opportunity to address national issues in mainstream venues at any previous time in U.S. history, Monette's high-visibility profile was one of his most significant achievements. He went on to write two important novels about AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991). He himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1995.

In his fiction, Monette unabashedly depicts gay men who strive to fashion personal identities that lead them to love, friendship, and self-fulfillment. His early novels generally begin where most coming-out novels end; his protagonists have already come to terms with their sexuality long before the novels' projected time frames. Monette has his characters negotiate family relations, societal expectations, and personal desires in light of their decisions to lead lives as openly gay men.

Two major motifs emerge in these novels: the spark of gay male relations and the dynamic alternative family structures that gay men create for themselves within a homophobic society. These themes are placed in literary forms that rely on the structures of romance, melodrama, and fantasy.

Monette's finest novel, Afterlife, combines the elements of traditional comedy and the resistance novel; it is the first gay novel written about AIDS that fuses personal love interests with political activism.

Monette's harrowing collection of deeply personal poems, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, conveys both the horrors of AIDS and the inconsolable pain of love lost. The elegies are an invaluable companion to Borrowed Time.

Before the publication and success of his memoir, Becoming a Man, it seemed inevitable that Monette would be remembered most for his writings on AIDS. Becoming a Man, however, focuses on the dilemmas of growing up gay. It provides at once an unsparing account of the nightmare of the closet and a moving and often humorous depiction of the struggle to come out. Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, a historical moment in the history

Reviews

[Ije the Devourer of Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so excited when in 1990 it was announced that David Lynch's series 'Twin Peaks' was going to be shown on tv.

I taped the entire series but by the end of the series I was lost and wondering to myself what had just happened. It was a great story with some intriguing special effects but I couldn't make head or tale of it and I never did understand

'who killed Laura Palmer.'????

Reading the Long Shot has left me feeling the way I did back then. The mystery is lost in the surrealism of the story and the complicated language.

It is written well and I enjoyed what I could understand but this book is like Twin Peaks all the way.

When Paul Monette first published The Long Shot it didn't go down well with the critics. I am not surprised. I don't think they were clever enough to 'get it' because it isn't enough to get this story you also have to get Thoreau and other references that Paul Monette makes in this book.

One review from 1981 describes this book as 'almost entirely ineffectual in its straining for serious emotional substance'.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...

Ouch!!

I think that is rather harsh. It isn't that bad. I just think the book is not easy to understand but beneath the complexity there is a story trying to come out, a bit like a butterfly trying to emerge from a cocoon.

Alas the butterfly doesn't make it.

The documentary (Brink of Summer's End) about Paul Monette's life describes how he felt frustrated by the critical reviews of this book and his other early books. Monette was a harsh critic himself describing his early novels including this one as 'silly and glib novels.'

Well I didn't think this was silly or glib, it was just very complex and surreal.

Apart from that I quite enjoyed the little that I was able to follow even though its writing style is really different to his later writing. Paul Monette's writing style changed when he went through the furnace of AIDS, loss and grief. Who can remain unchanged having gone through such a thing? And so his later books have a fierceness and a directness of a person who is running out of time but those were his later works and this is his early work.

And so it meanders with a dream like quality, dancing around in the explanation with so many things not being said, rather peculiar characters and a mystery that doesn't feel like a real mystery.

Although we do get to find out who did it in the end.

Unlike Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer.

So reviewing this book is challenging because the story is like modern art and those paintings that you study because it could either be a beautiful cathedral on a mountain top, or fish bones on top of a rubbish dump.

In the end I reflected on this book in a different way.

Some thirty four years after publication I read this book with knowledge of the author's life and I read this not just as a novel but also as a chapter of Paul Monette's life.

And I am not the only one to do so because this book has been republished and released as an audio book and people are reading it as they discover Paul Monette and because they want to read his fiction. So despite all those terrible reviews in the eighties (hard luck Kirkus) and despite its surrealism, this book is still going strong in 2015.

It is not an easy book to read. I had to slow down and re-read some passages in order to understand the story. Paul Monette doesn't tell us about the characters in this book, he shows us, but he shows us through glimpses of the characters, hidden by some very flowery language.

Jasper (a supposedly straight and married Hollywood star) is found dead in a hot tub with a young man (Harry). It appears to be a joint suicide but Greg who was at the very beginning of a relationship with Harry does not believe this and thinks it was murder. He then sets out to solve the crime and enlists the help of Viviene, Jasper's wife.
So this appears to be a straightforward murder mystery but it isn't. It has a kind of dreamlike quality as Greg imagines that he can solve the murder by observing those close to Jasper and by imagining what Harry would have done even though he didn't actually know Harry very well himself. Greg is assisted by his two neighbours Edna and Sid with whom he runs a business selling fake autographs to Hollywood fans. And Viviene has someone she suspects killed her husband and so together her and Greg try to solve the crime.

And they do but the mystery is lost in the surrealism, the past, the self discovery, the dream like quality of the story, the peculiar characters, Hollywood and the film industry, Thoreau and Walden, stardom, wealth and failed careers. Yes all those and more.

The good thing is it was well written. The bad thing is it was hard to understand. The best thing is we know 'whodunnit'.

But, I am still trying to puzzle out who killed Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks????

[LenaRibka · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think I'm able to be objective in rating of Paul Monette's books. Who am I to judge his works? Besides, I'm a HUGE fan of Paul Monette as a person. He burst into my life with his powerfully written, raw and unforgettable memoirs -Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story and Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, a magnificent monument to his lover's bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure. I ADMIRE his honesty , his essential and important contribution into changing the way the modern society started to think about AIDS and about being gay or lesbian.

This book belongs to his early works and is one of his few novels that isn't AIDS-related. But The Long Shot, in the matter of my LIKING, was not a big surprise for me. I knew that this mystery novel wasn't highly praised by critics, to put it diplomatically, and that the bad reviews met Paul Monette very hard. And even if I hate to admit it - I can understand WHY this novel wasn't a big success.
My biggest problem here was not the mystery itself, though I found the solution at the end of the book less satisfying, but the writing style. The Long Shot is written in the oddest, the most bizarre and weird manner. I can explain it only with the fact that Paul Monette at the beginning of his writing career wrote exclusively poetry. He was a natural born,

I don't think I'm able to be objective in rating of Paul Monette's books. Who am I to judge his works? Besides, I'm a HUGE fan of Paul Monette as a person. He burst into my life with his powerfully written, raw and unforgettable memoirs -Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story and Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, a magnificent monument to his lover's bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure. I ADMIRE his honesty , his essential and important contribution into changing the way the modern society started to think about AIDS and about being gay or lesbian.

This book belongs to his early works and is one of his few novels that isn't AIDS-related. But The Long Shot, in the matter of my LIKING, was not a big surprise for me. I knew that this mystery novel wasn't highly praised by critics, to put it diplomatically, and that the bad reviews met Paul Monette very hard. And even if I hate to admit it - I can understand WHY this novel wasn't a big success.

My biggest problem here was not the mystery itself, apart from that I found the solution at the end of the book less satisfying, but the writing style. The Long Shot is written in the oddest and the most bizarre and weird manner. I can explain it only with the fact that Paul Monette at the beginning his writing career wrote exclusively poetry. He was a natural born aesthetically inclined poet, and his high affinity for beautiful sentences, words, phrase is pretty much obvious here. But the language that could sound amazing and takes your breath away in a short poem, appears very artificial and pretentious in a mystery story that demands a clear story-line and not an agglomeration of blurred thoughts, very complicated sentences, distracting detailed descriptions the only purpose of wich was just to strike a reader with their beauty without making sense.

BUT

I don't think that there are a lot of writers on this planet that can write almost 300 pages in such poetical and fascinating way, the question is: was it worth all the efforts? I honestly have no idea.

Still a MUST read for all Paul Monette fans.


P.S. A big hug to Ije, my PM buddy, I won't do it up to the end without her moral support! *smooch*

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two books into Monette's lineup of fiction, I'm sensing such a strong pattern that it really feels like I know him.

I'm almost never one to treat artworks - least of all /stories/ - as pieces of The Greater Work Of Art That Is This Particular Guy's Life, because whenever I see people do that, it always seems so arbitrary to care about THAT guy so much that anything they make is automatically imbued with meaning. Like, to the point that they even seem to refuse to see ANYTHING as a flaw; no, it all indicates something about the creator, and by virtue of that alone, it's valuable. That being said... the first thing I read from Monette was Becoming A Man, and I connected with it so deeply that I guess I've become somewhat guilty of what I just laid out. Of course, it's NOT arbitrary here, and it's NOT an unwillingness to call something a flaw nearly as much as I really, truly feel motivated to examine any less-than-positive feelings I have. It's just so undeniable how talented Monette is from his other works, I'm inclined to think that *I'm* the one who's not getting it.

One other undeniable thing here is that Monette's prose is THICK. And progressively moreso as the book goes on. No matter how literate you are, if you have even the tiniest dash of OCD, you are going to re-read passages almost constantly. But like... as much as that will be out of a need to make sure you understand what's going on, it'll also be because you do, in fact, NEED to experience that sentence again. And it'll often be for both reasons. You got so lost in the beauty of the prose, in the perfect flow of words, that you forgot to take in what it actually means. Monette has a way with language that skips past the front of your brain and goes all the way to the back to play out the events like a movie, just, where you can't quite actually see it.

Speaking of movies, that's the pattern I was talking about. Or stories, more generally. MAYBE it's just this and Mrs. Carroll, and my opinion will change the more of him I read, but so far I see how much of his protagonists simply must just be /him/. A talent for language and for stories, and his connection with all the abstractions of life, is so inherent to Monette than he can't fathom not putting that same sensibility into his leading men - or really, ALL his characters. And it creates for an ironically VERY unrealistic world - where all communication is satisfying, where everyone has a certain degree of self-awareness even for the fact that they ARE in a narrative - but one which I, personally, fucking love. As it's literally set in Hollywood, anyway, it doesn't feel for a moment contrived. It just feels like Monette is making his desire for life to BE a story palpable, and I sympathize deeply, and I welcome every bit of that desire that he's trying to feed.

It's a bit further ironic, then, that The Long Shot has the bare bones of a real story. I suppose there comes a point where you're SO bent on life being a narrative that you forgot to put real events in it - which may, then, be the difference between life being a story vs life being a BOOK. The way it's all wrapped up in Walden kind of foreshadows this fact in a way - that it's going to be heavily self-reflective and incredibly internal, more like a memoir than a real chronological series of events. There ARE events, but you have to pay so much attention to pull them out of the slurry of prose. Many of them are even "offscreen" as you might put it (with the actual plot and dialogue feeling more cinematic than literary) and then only revealed as retrospective. One /could/ say that it's all a matter of showing off his ability to write purpler and purpler for a solid 150K words... OR you could say that this novel is, frankly, kind of exclusive. It's just not meant for most people. It's meant for people just like him, who can find the tail-end(s) of the story in there and pull it out. Also - I said it was a slurry of prose, but that's also just one side of it. More accurately, imo, it's that Monette needs everything to smooth together. Everything that happens feels like it has precedence. It's how you might live life when you're like our protagonists Greg or Vivien: a dream, where it's all hollistically connected. Where it's all like a film.

Thinking of The Long Shot this way, then, is admittedly where I come into some genuine complaints. Those very complaints are why I felt the need to say all I've said so far, because I've worked them over and tried to decide exactly how justified they are, based on why I think they're in there... and all that ruminating kind of did just bring me back to them, because I can't help but feel like Monette slipped a little.

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

1: For all that most things felt connected, the truth about the murder seemed... kind of random? Locked up in prose, even moreso. If you let the story feel like a movie (and lean into the sort of meta-ness of how it's a /badly-written/ movie), then yes, it works. But even with Monette there's some things I'll hesitate to do when I'm regarding a piece of media. I won't /completely/ accept it even if I get it. Like... it not only feels lame, but really unbelievable? Maybe I missed something (despite my efforts), but I couldn't see a reason for Max to have waited this long if he was going to PLAN out a murder like this. It would have made so much more sense if it was evidently a crime a passion or something.

2: Along that vein... Harry Dawes. With how cinematic this whole story is clearly supposed to be, and how core he is to the very premise of the plot, a resolution for him seems strangely missing. The explanation of the pure coincidence that led him to get murdered alongside Jasper just does not feel like enough. Greg himself also just seems no longer affected by it by then? It makes Harry feel honestly like a cheap hook to get Greg's intrigue in the plot, and lacking in follow-through. I was predicting for about the whole second half, up until the last few pages, that the entire murder investigation would be for naught, and that all those clues would be red herrings. I thought that what would be discovered was that /Greg/ was flawed in how he viewed this whole thing, that he was affected by a sort of self-centered grief that had him not consider that he just really didn't know Harry. Hell, I was even figuring "this is really predictable lol" but thinking, at the same time, that it was the perfect ending: that Harry had some fixation on Jasper, and he killed him and then himself. Or something like that.

3: Finally, part of what I owe the above prediction to: The cover of the book. That art of two men on a beach. I was waiting for so long to see which two characters that would actually BE. Mostly, of course, I assumed one of them would be Greg. But a good ways in, there were no love interests for him in sight. I was thinking there might be a flashback of some kind, but no. THEN I was thinking... oh, maybe Harry is the secret core of all this? Maybe that's HIM and Jasper. Maybe they had more of a relationship than anyone else realized. Maybe this painting is one of their last moments together..... Alas, I still don't know who those men are supposed to be. And that's really frustrating to me.

Final words:

Despite those complaints, I sincerely wish Monette was alive so that I had a chance of telling him that I understood this. I see the bits of self-criticism (of this very story) in both Greg and Vivien's internal monologues and also personally relate enough to add an extra layer of meta that feels a waste not to share. At least I can say so here and potentially add more layers.

Also, seriously, he's got such a talent for ending scenes in particular. And the very end brought it home hard. It didn't matter how unsatisfied I was about the resolution to the murder because of how visceral the final and /first/ confrontation of Jasper Cokes was, and how I felt it was undeniable what the story was really about.

It's insane to me that Monette's own relationship with the film industry was so tangential when the desires that poured out in his writing were so wrapped up in it. But then again, like Greg, it may be that he never would have felt the way he did if he weren't only ever on the fringes.

[Gene Hult · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Monette can definitely write a pretty sentence, the density of the language gives the book a hazy, turgid atmosphere that sometimes obscures the decent Hollywood murder mystery at the book's core. Still, it's an insightful, human story, with much to say about the nature of fame and fortune. I wished the book had been sexier, though -- the main characters are all widows or aged, who seem to have abandoned hope of sexual or romantic redemption. Ultimately, it was a sad and chilly read, rife with a kind of agoraphobic fatalism, although the offhand mystery kept me reading through the over-literary, downbeat thickets of language.

[Karl Kraus · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may or may not have been one of the "glib and silly little novels" that Monette regarded more or less as sins of his youth; in any case it's deadly serious throughout. Not that there's anything wrong with that. What's wrong with *The Long Shot* is that it's one of the most poorly constructed narratives I've come across in a long time. Why is Greg playing detective? He had only a brief fling with one-half of the couple that had apparently committed suicide, and had never met the other. What does he hope to accomplish by placing a copy of *Walden* -- speaking of "deadly serious" -- on Vivien's bed? Why would Vivien suspect the bodyguard or agent of her late husband (the other half of the couple that had apparently committed suicide) of having done this, and why does she ascribe such absurd motivations to them? How does Greg know the previous week's schedule of a bodyguard he'd never met? Why does Vivien correctly identify intruder Greg as the *Walden* culprit? Why are we readers belabored with passages from *Walden*? (Obviously some grand Literary Device is at work here, but it beats me as to what Monette has in mind, as *Walden* illuminates absolutely nothing about any of the aforementioned characters except possibly the drifter Greg had had the one-nighter with.)

As for the prose, if it had been any more leaden I would've suspected it had been translated, maintaining the flavor of the original German. Honestly, it was difficult enough just making it through the first couple dozen pages, which consisted mostly of Greg's moping as he makes a show of not watching the Oscars (of course he has the television on) because he's a failed screenwriter.

How did this mess get published? One star.

[Edward Amato · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have really enjoyed Monette's non-fiction and it has been years since I have read any thing that he has written. This was disappointing as I really didn't like the characters much, the story line was haphazard and unbelievable and the ending was lame. Other than that it was excellent.

[Mr Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun murder mystery. That I didn't expect to be a murder mystery! Not my favourite book of Monette's but enjoyable nonetheless.

[Mara Baldwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The compelling plot was overshadowed by the constant connections to Thoreau and the overly flowery prose. The characters were interesting.

[Todd Combs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fully enjoyed this story!

[Andrew Plewes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave it a 4 but I don’t really get what it’s all about. Certainly the cover has nothing to do with anything.

[Jennifer Cigler · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lots of $5 words thrown about a mediocre storyline at best. Characters fell quite flat and the supposed "plot twist" was rushed and anticlimactic. Monette can formulate some beautiful sentences, but as a novel, it was quite unconvincing.

[Patricia Boyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written book by one of my favorite authors.