SOURCE: Kaufman, David. “All in the Family.” Nation (1 July 1991): 21-5.

In the following review, Kaufman provides a generally favorable review of Frisk, finding both merit and dissatisfaction in the novel's experimental approach.

The very ambition to categorize so-called gay literature may be something of a self-defeating proposition: By reflecting the larger world, certainly the better examples of the “genre” transcend any categorical limitations we might infer. To insist otherwise would be to reject the assimilation captured so well in a number of new novels, and to hazard stereotypes that they deny.

This emerges as an inescapable message now that the world of commercial publishing is embracing a range of gay male novelists who refuse to depict the world according to an outmoded dualistic convention of “gay” and “straight” (as if it ever really were that) but rather as a more varied whole, the better to describe the ways...