Send to Kindle“Dust Devil on a Quiet Street”
Written by: Richard Bowes
From: Lethe Press
Published: July 2, 2013
318 pages
The term fictionalized memoir is somewhat comical because it implies that memories not categorized as such were penned by individuals with impossibly accurate memories. In *Dust Devil on a Quiet Street*, Richard Bowes embraces the freedom fiction offers while maintaining the brutal honesty and accuracy that makes great nonfiction narratives so enjoyable. This memoir combines previously published stories with the account of the wildest, weirdest, and most important events of the author’s life in New York.
*Dust Devil on a Quiet Street* kicks off Greenwich Village right after the Towers fall on 9/11. The tragedy seems to have ripped open old wounds and New York City’s past comes crawling out of them in the form of ghosts of previous disasters. Megs, Richard’s friend and old lover, is one of the first to notice and decides to go looking for the ghost of Geoff, a friend and lover she and Richard had in common. As the creepy ghost story progresses, Bowes uses the narrative to take readers on a bittersweet journey that explores the calamity on both a personal and communal way. From then on, the narrative goes back and forth in time, intermingling slightly surreal previously published short stories with the author’s real life experiences, friends, fears, career as a writer, sexual encounters, and New York.
With this fiction-infused memoir, Bowes has created a unique reading experience. On one had, there are stories about ghosts, violence, suicide, and even a wonderful Lovecraftian story about a strange room in a library that houses a mysterious tome that needs to be destroyed. On the other, Bowes’ life is the kind that deserves to be written about, and the true tales are as engaging as the invented ones. For example, Bowes offers an honest and unflinching look at his decades of life in the City’s homosexual community, an experience that goes from seedy underground clubs to unexpectedly poetic encounters and which recounts important historical events such as the start of the AIDS epidemic and its impact on the LGBTQ community.
Bowes is a very talented storyteller, and this book fully displays his writing chops. While most memoirs rely on chronological order, Bowes breaks away from that and sometimes starts a story in the present only to then travel back in time to tell a different or related anecdote. The result of this unusual format and the fact that he decided to obliterate the line between fiction and nonfiction is a reading experience unlike anything else out there.
*Dust Devil on a Quiet Street* deals with universal themes on a very personal context. Love, sadness, conscientiousness, friendship, the passage of time, sex, and death are all approached from various angles. However, what sets this memoir apart from others is that it also has a supernatural aura about it, a fantastic dreamlike feeling to it that makes it seem too short despite the fact that it’s 318 pages long. If you enjoy great writing that offers every emotion known to us and bridges the gap between the real and the imagined, this is definitely the book for you.
Reviewed By: Gabino Iglesias
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