Lawnboy

by Paul Lisicky

"Lawnboy is, quite simply, the real thing, a novel of mystery and great beauty." —Michael Cunningham

They all thought I was good-natured, upright and responsible, generous, affectionate, and kind, and of course I could be those things, but there was much more to me than that, a side that unnerved even myself, and this side included William.

Seventeen-year-old Evan's adventure begins with mowing a neighbor's lawn, a summer job that leads him into an unpredictable world of desire and betrayal. Estranged from his parents and his older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he make a choice between his family and desire? First published to wide acclaim in 1999, Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky wanders the lush and tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its south Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan's inner life.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Gay, Gay Fiction, Queer, Banned Books, M M Romance

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

PAUL LISICKY is the author of The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He has taught in the writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers University-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. .

Reviews

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Something was ringing inside my head, a fire alarm. You can change your life, you can”

Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky is a perfect coming of age novel. I couldn’t have picked a better book to read this summer. First published in 1998 and reprinted by Graywolf in 2006, this hidden gem is way overdue to be republished/reprinted so it can find a whole new era of queer readers (I wish I knew how to make this happen??) it’s definitely got the air of a queer cult classic to it. It felt like a similar reading experience to me as when I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie summer of last year. I will cherish the time I’ve read this for a long time.

Lisicky writes the character of Evan with such complexity and nuance. He brilliantly captures the narrative voice of a 17-year-old gay man trying to come into his own in the world in the early 90s in southern Florida. The prose was so vibrant, melancholic, lush; basically, every page had these knockout sentences where I would sit and marvel at the way Lisicky crafted them. How Florida is depicted was spot on - the hellish heat, the kitschy tourist traps, hotels against a harsh yet at times beautiful landscape. The push and pull of the plot and characters in Evan’s world made the novel’s pacing fantastic.

Naturally, this book brought me right back to being that same age where I knew everything and nothing about myself and the world. When I was impressionable, looking for love, for friends, for a place in the world where I felt safe and I belonged. An era of mistakes, awkwardness, finding a way forward. The cringey thoughts and opinions. This book was perfect to me, I only wish I could have read it earlier in my life.

My only hope is that I can introduce this book to more and more readers. Since it’s out of print, I found my copy at ThriftBooks. It was an ex-library copy and it felt really special knowing it had passed through the hands of so many readers before me. I can’t wait to read more of Lisicky’s work.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only recently discovered this author, and it is a mystery how his work previously escaped my reading radar.

Briefly believed I had already read this novel, confusing it with this book: Lawn Boy. Both of these novels are good reads, and searching for the title "Lawn boy" reveals that many authors have found gardeners and landscapers deeply, um, fascinating.

In Lisicky's novel, the youth's career as a lawn boy is fleeting. The novel takes place in 1980's Florida, a humid overgrown landscape of decay, deception, false promises; a landscape that also offers lush vegetation and attractive nurseries.

This is an unsettling novel. I was thrown off at times by inconsistencies, such as when Evan is first asked to mow his neighbour's lawn, the neighbour says his lawn mower is broken. Yet this does not turn out to be true. The reader is left to wonder, did the neighbour lie? Did he get it fixed? We never get to know the details, and I grew to discover these gaps were probably meant to illustrate the youth's view of a slippery, imaginary world, where he constructs and projects his obsessions, but many of the real life details are missing or contradictory — possibly even irrelevant. The point of view then is often subjective.

Not always a comfortable or easy read, but it is an impressive exploration of the complicated worldview of a young man, his fantasies, disappointments, nebulous desires, his urge to sabotage and a counterbalancing need to nourish and care for something, anything, even if it is no more than a thirsty plant.

The worst thing about discovering a new writer is realizing how many more books I now need to read. Lisicky has quite a list. And if the worst thing right now is discovering new books to read I'm definitely lucky!

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gay bildungsromans are a dime-a-dozen these days, but Paul Lisicky's "Lawnboy," a story of coming of age, gay, in South Florida, is the truest, purest, most thoughtful of the genre that I've ever encountered.

"Lawnboy" follows the story of a boy who at the ripe age of 17 abandons home to move in with his much, much older neighbor. Though the sex between them is amicable, eventually he realizes something is missing, and he moves out to find his brother. As he rediscovers his relationship with his brother, he falls in love with Hector, though whether he is loved back is much shrouded. In the end he sets out again in search of himself and what he finds is bruised and battered but not beyond repair. At the end of the day, "Lawnboy" is about finding your queer self in ways you never could have expected, and it's about loving yourself in ways you never would have thought possible.

Written in 1998, "Lawnboy" has stood the test of time and is as true and important today as it was before the turn of the century. Lisicky captures the tensions, dramas, and turmoils of coming to fully know and appreciate your gay self in a way that few, if any, other gay writers have managed. For this reason, and many others, I'm already excited to read this book over and over again.

[Michael Joe Armijo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in a matter of three days. First of all, I was intrigued by the Title when it was recommended to me. It was Recommended to those who enjoyed THE HOURS by Michael Cunningham.

I had LAWNBOY sitting on my bookshelf for a few months until I finally decided to get into it when I noticed a review on the backcover by Michael Cunningham, the reknown author. He described it as a novel of mystery and great beauty. Now that I've finished reading LAWNBOY I can say that I did enjoy it and, more importantly, I learned from it.

A few of my favorite lines were:
And then, as if in gratitude, the tree released itself, little ~red pieces falling now, coating us, sticking in our hair like blessings.------

I had something. I had power all along and hadn't even known it.------

I saw myself utterly alone in the world, a gleaming wasp inside a bright orange hive, alone with my anguish and raging hot need, and who'd be there to still me?------

The life I'd once taken for granted now seemed decadent and lush, a golden treasure inside a chest.------

I mean, wouldn't it be better not to know anything at all, and die--boom--just like that?------

You have to be able to say, 'I deserve to be with someone who's good to me.

[Gila Gila · Rating 2 out of 5]

Start by accepting from Page 1 that the narrator is a depressed, lonely gay teenager who hooks up with a wildly narcissistic 41 year old guy and moves in with him. Except that’s not what Lawnboy is about, really. I thought that was the story, but then snap, in a page we’re up and out and moving on to a dive motel elsewhere in Florida (mostly, it turns out, the only constant in this novel are winding descriptions Floridian fauna and vegetation). Another plot shift follows, but by then my interest was sapped. For so much story, the storytelling can be impossibly slow, and though gay sex scenes keep popping up, they all go limp within breathy moments. But my primary rankle with Lawnboy was the boy himself; a lot of the time I felt like I was reading the journal of a kid I had some empathy for, but didn’t really want to get to know – there’s no spark of uncommon wit or intelligence, just a disjointed recounting of experiences familiar to readers of gay coming-of-age novels, too sketchy to materialize.

[Dennis Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got lost in the lush landscapes and lyricism of Lawnboy. As a Florida resident, I especially appreciated the seductive, seedy character the state of Florida played in the lawn boy’s quest to find himself and affection.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, but not amazing. Didn't really go anywhere. But it is gaytastic.

[Alex Vogel · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.8

A little bit on the fence about this book.

I found it somewhat hard to get into. Part 1 didn't particularly convince me. Evan's love interest, William doesn't really come to life. There is no conceivable chemistry between them and it remains unclear as to what exactly those two find infatuating about each other. The entire relationship read neither particularly convincing, nor was it particularly sexy. Also, Lisicky kept using one particular stylistic quirk that irked me. I mean, yes, a narrator of course should have a unique voice, but this voice should not be shared by another person, especially not by some random friend. The relationship with the parents seems somewhat nebulous, as does Evan's moving out. I almost stopped reading after Part 1, thinking, this book would just result in me wanting my time back.
But ...

Something changes in Part 2. With Evan moving away from his hometown and leaving William, to move in with his estranged Brother, I began to actually enjoy this novel. The entire feel changes, Evan becomes a more well rounded character, he becomes more mature, has more interesting thoughts. The setting becomes more atmospheric and more vivid. Evans next love interest is more fleshed out than William, as are their interactions, their involvement feels more plausible and convincing. This part offers more insight in Evan's relationship with his parents, though, in a way it still remains a little obscure.

SPOILERS below.

I did find myself really wanting to know where all of this was leading. I did like that Evan ultimately went to see William again, and how this did explain the lack of sex in their relationship. I did like the almost too good to be true ending. It was low-key upbeat, without being sappy. I kind of loved that Evan would end up doing something that he had a passion for, that his journeyman years would ultimately lead him to where he would feel in the right place.

Bottom line: I'm glad I continued reading. Learning: Some books do actually get better :)

[Kevin Bertolero · Rating 5 out of 5]

This only took me so long to read because I didn't want it to end. What a beautiful, melancholy little novel. This might even be one of my all time favorites.

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn. I needed a book this good. I could find a beautifully rendered sentence on every single page.

Gay bilsdungsroman coming-of-age brilliance. Familiar and wholly original too.

[Manly Manster]

I don't want to say anything bad about this book, but I didn't understand what the plot was. I liked the cover photo.

There were a lot of things that happened, but they didn't relate to any type of story. The character leaves home, moves in with an older man, moves out, and then some other stuff happens before the book ends. The book is really long. The "other stuff" part took a long time, but I was just skimming the book by then. There were a lot of flashbacks to his high school days, and other things in the past, but I don't like when a book tells me about things that happened in the past.

The writing was good in terms of the voice of the character and the use of the first person perspective. The weak part was arranging the details of the story to engage the reader in a plot focused story.

[Ivan Benedict · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a story of a young gay man. He leaves his
dysfunctional parents. He lives with an older man
and has great (explicit) sex with him, but the relationship
is dysfunctional. He leaves to live with his brother.
That relationship is dysfunctional. He has an affair
with another young man. It's not great, and it ends
badly. He leaves. Finally at the end of the story he
finds another older man who is kind and respectful of
him. Does this mean he will finally be happy? Who knows?
The reviews I read indicated the writing is very good, and
someone said it was humorous. The writing was good; it
had no humor.
Perhaps this is the story of many young gay men. And
I understand that. I just don't want to read it.

[michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adding Mark Doty's book reminded me how much I loved this one. (They are cute boyfriends who I waited on all the time in P-town.) One of the things I like about queer fag fiction that is from a time before the queer visibility that we "enjoy", is that due to the the secret nature of being queer, the opportunites the characters have to understand and experiment with identity often feel so uncomfortable that you want to judge them. But it is always important to remind yourself of a situation's context because that can change so many things. So you practice not judging them!! (Always a good excercise.) But don't call me a relativist!! Yo! It's just not true!

[Veronika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lawnboy is a gem of a novel. When it comes to the writing, I absolutely adored the author's style—the descriptions, the choice of words—it's exactly what I seek in a book. In terms of the plot, Evan's exploration of his own identity is beautifully depicted, creating a compelling storyline that captures the vulnerability and confusion of adolescence. Definitely a thought-provoking and emotionally rich read for anyone who enjoys coming-of-age stories.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nevermind what it says on the back cover. It's a slow, drama queen type of read.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A coming-of-age story with a gay protagonist, in some ways feels unlikely, but the writing is lush, and descriptively beautiful. A fast paced book, and reads as rapidly.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny. Great for the 10 to 12 year old range.

[Meghan Moore · Rating 1 out of 5]

I get it…is weird but it’s not even well-written enough to be banned. It should be banned bc it’s boring.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Challenge 2018 - Pinterest: book with a great first line. A wonderful book about the pain of growing up and not knowing what you want. Evan starts out the summer as a lawnboy, cutting a neighbors grass. This leads to him coming out to his family and leaving them to move into the neighbor's house and bed. Evan believes he is in love with William, but really does not know what he wants. The second part of the novel is him living with his brother Peter, who also left home at an early age. Peter runs a rundown hotel with his buddy Hector, until Evan sleeps with Hector and Peter discovers it, kicking Hector out. Evan realizes he does not belong with his brother either, and returns home to be unwanted by his mother and step-father. He eventually meets Perry, gets a job at a local nursery (the book is riddled with plant references), and is willed the nursery by the owner who dies from a heart attack. The novel takes place during the AIDS scare, leaving Evan to wonder about his own negative status. The language the author uses is sad and humorous, but always beautiful and haunting. Of course he was part of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and it shows.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story told from the point of view of a young man who is exploring his own identity. They all believed me to be kind, kind, affectionate, and upright. Of course, I could be all of those things. However, there was much more to me than that, a side that even I found unsettling, and this side involved William.
The story begins with seventeen-year-old Evan agreein to mow his next door neighbor's lawn during the summer. This employment leads him into more than just a summer job, but introduces him to an erratic world of desire and treachery. He moves in with 41-year-old William after being estranged from his parents and older brother. This starts a series of unsuccessful attempts to create a new home. He must decide whether to put his family or his passion first. Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky traverses the lush and turbulent landscape of the early 1990s, its south Florida environment as fertile and problematic as Evan's inner turmoil. It was first published to widespread acclaim in 1999.

[karie krysiak · Rating 2 out of 5]

loved how “florida” it was
the motel part with peter reminded me of the florida project in a sense
and i though his relationship with peter was interesting, even though confusing and wished it was developed more
it didn’t really go anywhere and it was kinda confusing to read, as it was hard to imagine for me, and that might’ve been due to maybe possibly dare i say not good writing (whoops kill me) but it was comfortable to read (if that makes any sense)
but i loved how he wanted to be with people who treated him badly, but then when he was treated nice for once he doesn’t feel like he deserves it, or he freaks out and wants to break it off
read while i was the car with my dad going to east lansing, mainly.
and even though i am rating it a 2 stars, i still cannot get over how comfortable i was reading it and at peace. even though it could be vulgar at some points, granted it is in the perspective of a 17-20 year old i liked the vulgarity, in that the author wasn’t “scared” or apprehensive to write it which i greatly respect

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book and had great hopes for Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky but like most of the relationships in the book it’s dysfunctional and left much to be desired.

There was a lot of promise and storylines that really could haven taken off and been explored but they just languished or were bypassed.

I forgave the strange and grossly inappropriate relationship that ensues between Evan and his much older neighbor William but it droned on too long and really seemed implausible.

Then when Evan leaves William and heads to his brother Peter’s struggling resort the story still sputters and struggles with traction adding little spice that could have really been an interesting plot twist in the relationship he fosters with Hector and even his brother.

There’s a lot in this book that just never gets explained and while the writing was good and I appreciated all the references to trees and plants, I feel I was robbed of a good story in a book that could have held one.

[Ethan]

Reading this in tandem with Lisicky’s memoir, Later, is fascinating. Identifying things/experiences/people(ish) that carry over into the novel.

Honestly, it’s a novel I feel somewhat incapable of giving a rating and I don’t even think I can clearly say why. There’s some incredible writing, a lot of which hit very very close to home, sometimes making it kind of a difficult read only because there are times where I want to smack some sense into the narrator but then immediately have that feeling followed and upended by the self-realization/reflection that I went through extremely similar thought processes and unsteady waves of emotion at the same age.
I don’t think the full impact of the book as a whole hit me until after I finished it, and even now I think it might still be hitting me, especially as I finish Later and continue to have my own perpetual existential crises.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I thought Lisicky did a great job of capturing Evan's angst. I particularly enjoyed the parts of the book that involved Evan and William and Evan, Peter, and Hector. All of the relationships were interesting and complex. My only minor quibbles were with the passage of time (Evan's age seems to jump from 17 to his early 20's without an explanation, unless I missed it, of what happened in between those years) and the ending (that was a bit of a letdown for me).

[Yusef Bulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, moving and compelling novel.

I loved it. Not much else to say and of course I would recommend it to friends and loved ones.

[Jonathan May · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the novel takes a bit to get going, its insistent and lost narrator faces a sometimes hostile, indifferent world over and over in his quest to be loved.

[John :D · Rating 1 out of 5]

16 pages in a 40 year old man starts having sex with a 17 year old boy. Sorry not sorry pedophilia weird asf I’m not reading this

[Braeden Udy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lush and lyrical writing about coming of age as a gay young man during the AIDS epidemic.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this novel maybe twenty years ago and loved it so I bought a copy and finally read it again and to rework an old cliche discovered you can't go back again. I was astounded at just how much this novel annoyed me, though when I saw Paul Lisicky was praised by and compared by others to Michael Cunningham, I should have realised that I was in for a let down.

My problem is not that Lisicky writes badly it is that he writes like someone who has never existed outside of the 'creative writing' cocoon of various US universities. The plot of this novel involves a 17 year old boy about to start his last year in high school who starts an affair with a 41 year old neighbor, and as a result his parents throw him out and he moves in with the neighbor. It doesn't work out, he asks to go home again, but it's too much bother for his parents and they say no, so he goes and lives with his brother who is eight years older and also left home as a teenager without qualifications or skills. But in the meantime the brother has acquired, as in borrowed money from a bank to buy, a motel which he is fixing up. Things don't work out with his brother so the boy wanders off, gets hired in a nursery whose owner then dies and leaves the business to him. As he only just turned 21 and found another rich older boy friend you can't help thinking that he has spent his time more usefully then if he'd finished high school and gone to university (he'd been accepted by top schools all over the country).

I've simplified the story somewhat and if you bother reading the novel you would say that it is a tale exploring a teenagers struggle with sex and acceptance in the age of AIDS but what I find unforgivable is its falseness. A seventeen year old homeless boy without money or even a high school diploma doesn't end up owning a nursery (or a motel) by the time they are 21 they end up on the streets peddling their ass. This is the tale of being down and out told by somebody who has only read about it. George Orwell or Jack London would have laughed at this nonsense. So would Dennis Cooper, Bruce Benderson, Paul Rogers or David Wojnarowicz. This is a walk on the wild side remade as tofu for middle class couch potatoes who want the vicarious thrill of transgression but in a safe way.

It is a fiction that, despite its literary qualities, is all lies. It is like way too much of the fiction pedalled by small presses from young authors (please see my review of 'Mira Corpora' by Jeff Jackson where I go into the issues I have raised in greater length).

[Sara Habein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is it fair to compare one writer to another? Is the comparison ever quite right? Blurbs for Lawnboy compared Paul Lisicky to Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Home at The End of the World, etc.), and the cover even boasted a blurb from Cunningham himself. While certainly flattering, how does Lawnboy compare?

Non-straight characters? Check.
Coming of age/awakening type plot? Check.
Complicated romance? Checkity-check-check.

But couldn’t one say this about plenty of other books? Francesca Lia Block also had these things, but Wheetzie Bat and Lawnboy and The Hours are three entirely different books. Then again, it’s been a little while since I’ve read Cunningham’s work. Still, there is one clear way that Lisicky and Cunningham reminded me of each other: It took me the first third of the book to really get into it. That’s not to say I spent the first third uninterested; I just questioned how much I would enjoy the whole thing. Lawnboy is divided into three parts, and by Part 2, I became much more engaged in how things turned out.

I enjoyed Lawnboy well enough that I will keep an eye out for Lisicky’s other work. The lingering, awestruck descriptions of physicality, and the unabashed searches for affection were enough to make me want more. It doesn’t matter whether Paul Lisicky writes anything like Michael Cunningham — Let the man stand on his own.

(Full review can be found at Glorified Love Letters.)