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The Family of Max Desir
It was a family dealing with old values, acceptance and death. Max Desir loved his Italian roots and hearing his mother, Marie, recount tales of the old country. And he loved his American family, his father John a successful self-made businessman in New Jersey. As he came of age, Max discovered something else he loved - men - and met the love of his life in Italy. Now, at age 40, the family is split: Marie and his siblings accept Max and Nick as a stable, long-term couple but his father John does not. When a needlepoint family tree is to be hung at Christmas, it's too much for John. Then the spectre of death enters as Marie rapidly declines with brain cancer. Loyalties divided, acceptance of family is re-examined.
In this beautiful, haunting tale, told in Robert Ferro's clear, impassioned narrative, he created a classic. "An honest, eloquent and entirely original novel ... at once realistic and mythological, intensely personal and public ... a triumph," opined Edmund White.
Originally published in 1984, this edition includes a 2019 foreword by fellow author and friend Felice Picano.
In this beautiful, haunting tale, told in Robert Ferro's clear, impassioned narrative, he created a classic. "An honest, eloquent and entirely original novel ... at once realistic and mythological, intensely personal and public ... a triumph," opined Edmund White.
Originally published in 1984, this edition includes a 2019 foreword by fellow author and friend Felice Picano.
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
3 people are currently reading
174 people want to read
About the author
Robert Ferro
15 books13 followersAttended Rutgers University and received a Master's Degree from the University of Iowa. Founder of the The Violet Quill literary group with his partner Michael Grumley.
Died of AIDS in 1988 a few months after his partner, Michael Grumley.
Died of AIDS in 1988 a few months after his partner, Michael Grumley.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 18, 2019
The Family of Max Desir
By Robert Ferro
First published 1983
Requeered Tales Edition, 2019
Five stars
In this review are really two reviews, as I try to split my mind into the me I was when I bought this book in 1983, and the me I’ve become in the intervening thirty-six years.
I loved this book when I first read it, the year I turned twenty-eight. The two things that made it electric in its resonance for me were (1) it was about a male couple dealing with family as an integral part of their lives; and (2) a lot of it was set in New Jersey, where my boyfriend of almost eight years and I had moved three years earlier at the start of our professional careers. Of course, the real punch of this book – which is why it remains so important as a cultural document and not just as a piece of modern literature – is that it made me feel VISIBLE. It is hard to grasp the power that books like this had, especially those that achieved some mainstream success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in undergirding a burgeoning sense of identity and self-worth for those of us in Ferro’s generation.
The chronology of “The Family of Max Desir” is slightly confounding, since Max himself is born in 1941, five years before the Baby Boom started and Robert Ferro himself was born. The internal chronology of the plot is vaguely delineated, giving a rather fluid sense of time throughout the book. Ferro puts lots of clues in his text, but it is (purposely, I suspect) not meant to be precise. This was not written as a memoir, for all its autobiographical elements; it is a personal, emotional and psychological journey, incorporating vivid vignettes and surreal fragments from the protagonist’s life. When I first read this book, I didn’t even notice that Max Desir was fourteen years older than I was, separated from my experience by most of a generation. What I saw was a man, who loved another man (Nick Flynn), whom he had met in his early twenties. Most importantly, I saw that these men insisted that they, as a couple, would be part of Max Desir’s family.
At the center of the book is the drama of Marie and John Desir. Their romantic backstory is presented (at least to my mind) as a parallel to the equally romantic backstory of Nick and Max’s relationship. It is, however, as Max’s parents that Marie and John’s story dominates the bulk of the novel. Max and Nick’s story is entirely subservient to that central tragedy, but is still more prominent than the stories of Max’s siblings and their families – who become sort of a Greek Chorus to Max’s struggle with his mother’s cancer and his father’s shame over his relationship with Nick. In a strange way, there’s a pop-culture parallel with Mario Puzo’s obscenely popular novel “The Godfather,” (1969), but without all the crime and the killing. “The Family of Max Desir” is a quietly operatic saga, focused on a single love-filled family struggling to adapt to traumatic changes.
As I read Felice Picano’s wonderful, insider’s-look foreword to the ReQueered Tales edition, I realized that I not only had read Picano’s books when they were first published, but those of all the other authors he mentions as part of Ferro’s gay literary circle. As one half of a young gay couple who had consciously decided to eschew the urban gay ghetto for what we referred to as “darkest suburbia” in 1980, the flood of books by gay authors was a lifeline to a place of safety. When life in New Jersey got too weird, we could go to Oscar Wilde in Greenwich Village and find our people.
Something of which I’m not sure is how Ferro saw Max and Nick’s relationship relative to that of Marie and John Desir. You’d think it was meant to be a clear parallel, because of Max’s struggle with his father over accepting Nick as equal to his siblings’ spouses. However, since this was the 1970s, Ferro’s description of Nick and Max’s partnership is all about sexual liberation and the rejection of heteronormative conventions of fidelity. Indeed, after the initial romantic set-up in Italy, Nick only makes cameo appearances to place him in the context of Max’s family. Otherwise, we learn far more about the various other men with whom Max is entangled, and only get fleeting glimpses into Nick’s take on the Desir family drama. Once again, reading this when I was twenty-eight, at a time when my boyfriend and I were in a theoretically open relationship, this didn’t register. On the other hand, from the perspective of a couple who decided to close their relationship in 1988, the year both Robert Ferro and his partner died of AIDS, and with the thirty-one years since that decision as a lens, the juxtaposition of these two couples feels less sure. Maybe that was Ferro’s intention. Maybe Max’s desire (ah!) to be like his parents is at odds with his desire to be a modern, proud, sexually liberated gay man. Possibly Max fights for his father’s acceptance precisely because he himself isn’t sure if he sees Nick as equal to his mother’s place in his father’s life.
In the end, I suspect this book is really about Max Desir’s lifelong sense that he is living in his family’s world, but no longer quite part of it. Some short, seemingly random snippets, about telepathic aliens and a blond English explorer mistaken for a god in the Amazon jungle, might suggest this; as does Max’s anxiety over the disparity between his career and that of his parents and siblings.
Unlike most popular work being published by gay authors today, there is no neat ending and no comfortable conclusion to the story. Life simply moves on, each character coping in his own way, as best he can.
By Robert Ferro
First published 1983
Requeered Tales Edition, 2019
Five stars
In this review are really two reviews, as I try to split my mind into the me I was when I bought this book in 1983, and the me I’ve become in the intervening thirty-six years.
I loved this book when I first read it, the year I turned twenty-eight. The two things that made it electric in its resonance for me were (1) it was about a male couple dealing with family as an integral part of their lives; and (2) a lot of it was set in New Jersey, where my boyfriend of almost eight years and I had moved three years earlier at the start of our professional careers. Of course, the real punch of this book – which is why it remains so important as a cultural document and not just as a piece of modern literature – is that it made me feel VISIBLE. It is hard to grasp the power that books like this had, especially those that achieved some mainstream success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in undergirding a burgeoning sense of identity and self-worth for those of us in Ferro’s generation.
The chronology of “The Family of Max Desir” is slightly confounding, since Max himself is born in 1941, five years before the Baby Boom started and Robert Ferro himself was born. The internal chronology of the plot is vaguely delineated, giving a rather fluid sense of time throughout the book. Ferro puts lots of clues in his text, but it is (purposely, I suspect) not meant to be precise. This was not written as a memoir, for all its autobiographical elements; it is a personal, emotional and psychological journey, incorporating vivid vignettes and surreal fragments from the protagonist’s life. When I first read this book, I didn’t even notice that Max Desir was fourteen years older than I was, separated from my experience by most of a generation. What I saw was a man, who loved another man (Nick Flynn), whom he had met in his early twenties. Most importantly, I saw that these men insisted that they, as a couple, would be part of Max Desir’s family.
At the center of the book is the drama of Marie and John Desir. Their romantic backstory is presented (at least to my mind) as a parallel to the equally romantic backstory of Nick and Max’s relationship. It is, however, as Max’s parents that Marie and John’s story dominates the bulk of the novel. Max and Nick’s story is entirely subservient to that central tragedy, but is still more prominent than the stories of Max’s siblings and their families – who become sort of a Greek Chorus to Max’s struggle with his mother’s cancer and his father’s shame over his relationship with Nick. In a strange way, there’s a pop-culture parallel with Mario Puzo’s obscenely popular novel “The Godfather,” (1969), but without all the crime and the killing. “The Family of Max Desir” is a quietly operatic saga, focused on a single love-filled family struggling to adapt to traumatic changes.
As I read Felice Picano’s wonderful, insider’s-look foreword to the ReQueered Tales edition, I realized that I not only had read Picano’s books when they were first published, but those of all the other authors he mentions as part of Ferro’s gay literary circle. As one half of a young gay couple who had consciously decided to eschew the urban gay ghetto for what we referred to as “darkest suburbia” in 1980, the flood of books by gay authors was a lifeline to a place of safety. When life in New Jersey got too weird, we could go to Oscar Wilde in Greenwich Village and find our people.
Something of which I’m not sure is how Ferro saw Max and Nick’s relationship relative to that of Marie and John Desir. You’d think it was meant to be a clear parallel, because of Max’s struggle with his father over accepting Nick as equal to his siblings’ spouses. However, since this was the 1970s, Ferro’s description of Nick and Max’s partnership is all about sexual liberation and the rejection of heteronormative conventions of fidelity. Indeed, after the initial romantic set-up in Italy, Nick only makes cameo appearances to place him in the context of Max’s family. Otherwise, we learn far more about the various other men with whom Max is entangled, and only get fleeting glimpses into Nick’s take on the Desir family drama. Once again, reading this when I was twenty-eight, at a time when my boyfriend and I were in a theoretically open relationship, this didn’t register. On the other hand, from the perspective of a couple who decided to close their relationship in 1988, the year both Robert Ferro and his partner died of AIDS, and with the thirty-one years since that decision as a lens, the juxtaposition of these two couples feels less sure. Maybe that was Ferro’s intention. Maybe Max’s desire (ah!) to be like his parents is at odds with his desire to be a modern, proud, sexually liberated gay man. Possibly Max fights for his father’s acceptance precisely because he himself isn’t sure if he sees Nick as equal to his mother’s place in his father’s life.
In the end, I suspect this book is really about Max Desir’s lifelong sense that he is living in his family’s world, but no longer quite part of it. Some short, seemingly random snippets, about telepathic aliens and a blond English explorer mistaken for a god in the Amazon jungle, might suggest this; as does Max’s anxiety over the disparity between his career and that of his parents and siblings.
Unlike most popular work being published by gay authors today, there is no neat ending and no comfortable conclusion to the story. Life simply moves on, each character coping in his own way, as best he can.
September 24, 2019
A remarkable book that, in detail, outlines the tensions of loving a family who has issue with your very identity and loving a lover who has issue with these issues your family holds, Robert Ferro's "The Family of Max Desir" is truly a gay classic.
Following the life of Max Desir - from the origins of his Italian-American family in Sicily through to his meeting an American lover while on holiday in Italy, this tale is one that so many queer people can identify with - how to love family who can't seem to love your for who you are.
Remarkably, Ferro also manages to squeeze in conversations on the tensions inherent in gay relationships and the internal struggles gay characters often encounter within themselves. While at times, the various lines of thought don't seem to meet up, at the end this book is truly a cherishable classic.
Following the life of Max Desir - from the origins of his Italian-American family in Sicily through to his meeting an American lover while on holiday in Italy, this tale is one that so many queer people can identify with - how to love family who can't seem to love your for who you are.
Remarkably, Ferro also manages to squeeze in conversations on the tensions inherent in gay relationships and the internal struggles gay characters often encounter within themselves. While at times, the various lines of thought don't seem to meet up, at the end this book is truly a cherishable classic.
June 6, 2013
Robert Ferro continues to be the gay author whose early passing I most greatly mourn. The world missed out on some daring and heartfelt literature when he died. As is fitting with his love of occult and supernatural themes, The Family of Max Desir feels like an eerie premonition of the increasing grief and growing death that was about to ravish a generation. An unrecognized classic by an unrecognized auteur.
November 2, 2013
I really enjoyed this... As the title suggests, it is the family story of Max Desir, his aging ailing mother, stubborn father, brothers and sisters, and a story of Max coming to terms with his homosexuality and family.
Toward the end, I really couldn't see the significance of the last 30 pages, and seemed like it could have been trimmed down.
The final scene Max resolves his straining relationship with his father for closure but I'd still like to know what happens next.
From what I can tell, the author died of AIDS in the 80's, but I would really be interested in reading more from Ferro.
Toward the end, I really couldn't see the significance of the last 30 pages, and seemed like it could have been trimmed down.
The final scene Max resolves his straining relationship with his father for closure but I'd still like to know what happens next.
From what I can tell, the author died of AIDS in the 80's, but I would really be interested in reading more from Ferro.
April 7, 2011
Must read classic! Enjoyed this novel very much.
December 25, 2010
Odd but fairly engrossing. I expected this to be just like the other books by Ferro's fellow compatriots in the so-called Violet Quill group: another dreamy, exquisitely crafted, sex-soaked account of post-Stonewall NYC like you find everywhere in Edmund White, and which reach their apogee of perfection in Andrew Holleran's breathtaking Dancer from the Dance. But although this book does thrum along like a hazy, post-coital memory, it's not really about being gay, or living in New York -- it's about grief. In that way it reminded me of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," which is obviously (at times stridently) about being gay and being a New Yorker, but which is at its heart really about how a family of friends deals with the fact that death has now taken up permanent residence at the very core of all their relationships.
This book examines the same conundrum, but chooses as its test case an actual blood-related family, rather than a spiritually connected/self-selected family (managing to very sophisticatedly make no value judgement on which form of family has stronger, more painfully severed, ties). Also like Kushner (or I should say looking forward to Kushner, as Max Desir came first), this book has its share of surreal, mystical moments, with a host of alien visitations, voodoo ceremonies, talking ghosts, and the like, which are just jarring enough to make you step back and think, but not so strange that it doesn't seem part and parcel of a universe whose logic has been overturned by disease.
ALSO also like Kushner, the central character of Max Desir feels -- like Kushner's main man Louis Ironson -- pretty flatly rendered, and comes off like a total pill. Max's aggrieved widower father John is a much more vivid character, more eager to confront his inner self and grapple with the spiritual ramifications of what death and love can do to a person. Perhaps this was deliberate. Both Ferro and his partner Michael Grumley (a fellow Violet Quiller) were dead within 5 years of this novel's publication in 1983, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Maybe Ferro's novel is saying that the real fear of death is that there is no queer way to voice a fear of death, no way to grieve that feels authentic to his queer experience. Is there really a way now, nearly 30 years later? Can sadness and depression even be specifically gay? Ferro doesn't seem to have the answer, and Kushner, for all his talents and all the pyrotechnics of his "gay fantasia," doesn't really have much more to add, either.
This book examines the same conundrum, but chooses as its test case an actual blood-related family, rather than a spiritually connected/self-selected family (managing to very sophisticatedly make no value judgement on which form of family has stronger, more painfully severed, ties). Also like Kushner (or I should say looking forward to Kushner, as Max Desir came first), this book has its share of surreal, mystical moments, with a host of alien visitations, voodoo ceremonies, talking ghosts, and the like, which are just jarring enough to make you step back and think, but not so strange that it doesn't seem part and parcel of a universe whose logic has been overturned by disease.
ALSO also like Kushner, the central character of Max Desir feels -- like Kushner's main man Louis Ironson -- pretty flatly rendered, and comes off like a total pill. Max's aggrieved widower father John is a much more vivid character, more eager to confront his inner self and grapple with the spiritual ramifications of what death and love can do to a person. Perhaps this was deliberate. Both Ferro and his partner Michael Grumley (a fellow Violet Quiller) were dead within 5 years of this novel's publication in 1983, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Maybe Ferro's novel is saying that the real fear of death is that there is no queer way to voice a fear of death, no way to grieve that feels authentic to his queer experience. Is there really a way now, nearly 30 years later? Can sadness and depression even be specifically gay? Ferro doesn't seem to have the answer, and Kushner, for all his talents and all the pyrotechnics of his "gay fantasia," doesn't really have much more to add, either.
March 11, 2018
Hard to believe that 35 years ago, a gay novel was in and of itself something of a miracle but Robert Ferro's second book is much more than a heartfelt piece of history. It's a somewhat wild creation that bounces from Italian-American family drama in Jersey to homoerotic fantasy with rich fairy godmother in Rome to creepy sexual liaison incorporating some form of voodoo to a story within a story set in the Amazon. Sometimes it clicks, sometimes it clunks but there's a sense of risk here that pushes it the groundbreaker beyond mere queer pop lit.
May 10, 2022
Some beautiful passages, particularly of the family history and Max's time in Italy at the beginning of the novel. It might fail to cohere and lacks momentum, but it's still a great time capsule of a very specific moment in gay lit.
October 16, 2021
very good i think the grief the dad went through was written really very well. Enjoyed it
April 19, 2023
Some nice stuff here, and having just read Agee I do see the similarities, but I wanted something more…
August 5, 2023
It’s been fascinating to read these gay novels of the 80’s. This, and others, deserve a broader audience.
April 24, 2014
Disappointing. I read it through, hoping always that something would actually happen in this story, but alas, there is no plot. Just a rather mundane story about a gay man who's father has a hard time accepting his homosexuality. Ho hum...not exactly breaking news. The writing is pretty good, but was put to no particular good purpose. The characters were two dimensional; I never felt like I knew who they were or felt any real connection between them. And ultimately there's that plot thing...or the lack thereof.
January 31, 2015
One of the best novels of the 1980s gay male literary output from the big publishers, in this case Dutton. Because the novel is covering a specific period in time, younger readers may be bored; try to read it more like history. Each generation of gays takes the tribe a bit farther down the road, and each step must be celebrated. Forever. [I read a borrowed copy in 1996 but bought a signed hardcover first-edition for $93.75 in 2012 at Larry McMurtry's now defunct Booked Up in Archer City, Texas.]
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August 3, 2011No conocia a este autor y ha sido una sorpresa positiva, tiene un estilo poetico, pero te puedes identificar facilmente con el protagonista de la novela. El tema, lo complicado que es ser gay e italoamericano de segunda generacion. Suena muy frivolo, pero es asi, como combinar familia y ser gay a veces es complicado.
January 20, 2013
Fresh and original when Ferro wrote this novel thirty years ago. Gorgeous language.
April 10, 2017
very moving. truthful about relationships. but did couple tangents odd.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews