PINS. - Review - book reviews

PINS * Jim Provenzano * Myrmidude Press * $14.95

The title of Bay Area Reporter sportswriter Jim Provenzano's first novel, PINS, stands for "person in need of supervision." It's also jock talk, a catchphrase of high school wrestling, the team sport that has Provenzano's teenage boys watching their weight like fashion models. By the end of the book, "pins" means, more grimly, the pins through a young trauma victim's neck, holding it straight.

Holding adolescent bodies together is one of the subtler motifs that play across Provenzano's coming-of-age drama. Star wrestler Joey Nicci hooks up with the public school wrestling squad and falls in love with his buddy, Dink. Or rather, the guys are thrown in love, grappling in floor-slamming wrestling moves that they execute wearing singlets.

Wrestling's the ultimate gay sport. But queer love is complicated, especially for 15-year-old jocks. Not until Joey and Dink's involvement in the beating death of the wrestling team's designated "faggot" can the two boys touch each other in a way that highlights love rather than competition.

Provenzano has a swift and flexible style that cuts against sentiment and reveals, in moments of grace, something like true feeling. He's also funny. He has an ear for teenage banter, and he's tartly lyrical about Jersey towns, Italian families, and homemade mix tapes with titles like GRAPPLE and AURGH. Most urgent, he shows how gay bashing is still an outlet for kids who grew up in the so-called gay '90s.

Weir is the author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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