Coming of age drama that’s laced with sex, by Sussex author

{Article in the SUSSEX EXPRESS, Thursday 20 September 2012}

A car plunging off Beachy Head is the arresting cover of The Dropout, the newly published novel from Sussex author David Gee.

It is billed as a “coming-of-age drama that offers a sly, edgy twist on themes from The Graduate and American Pie”.

The story covers a year in the life of 19-year-old Paul Barrett who drops out of university in the Midlands after his girlfriend dumps him and their gay best friend, who has a major crush on Paul, commits suicide.

Paul returns to his Sussex hometown and goes to work as a sales rep for his uncle, a furniture tycoon. The town is a lightly fictionalized Eastbourne which Paul ungratefully calls Boredom-on-Sea.

It totally fails to live up to this image as Paul’s sexual ‘odyssey’ takes him through one-night stands with foreign students, a shack-up with his uncle’s stepdaughter and an affair with the office receptionist who is his uncle’s gold-digging mistress. Paul also attracts another gay admirer: unable to forget Neil’s suicide, how will Paul deal with it this time?

David Gee was born in Plumpton, grew up in Hailsham and went to school in Lewes. After a career which took him to London and the Persian Gulf he now lives in Newhaven.

“Paul’s university and the factory are taken from my own experiences,” he said, “although Paul himself is largely based on someone on I knew in my gap year.

“Two years ago I met a student in Brighton who was having a hard time dealing with a gay ‘stalker’, so I built up that element of the story, which I’ve set in 2003 with the Bush-Blair ‘War on Terror’ in the background.”

Gee’s first novel, published in 2009, was Shaikh-Down, a spicy comedy set on an imaginary island in the Persian Gulf, where a ‘bedroom coup’ offers a handy shortcut to Regime Change. His third book, coming next year, is intriguingly titled The Bexhill Missile Crisis.

Who is in the car that goes off Beachy Head? “You’ll have to buy the book to find out,” says Gee. You can read the first two chapters on the author’s website: www.davidgeebooks.com

He will be signing copies of The Dropout at a Macmillan Coffee Morning in St Andrew’s Church, Waterloo Street, Hove, on Friday, September 28.

The book is published by Troubador and priced at £7.99.

RIP: Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal famously described Tennessee Williams's death in 1983 (choking on the cap from a bottle of eyedrops) as "a good career move". Well, now he too has made that good career move. Another great writer joins the celestial 'pantheon'.

He will be remembered (and missed) as much for his barbed wit, his put-downs and his spats with other writers (Mailer, Capote, William F. Buckley) as for his writing. Born into a Washington 'dynasty' he ruthlessly pilloried every president from FDR to George W. His epic cycle of political novels began crisply with Washington DC (1967) and ended flatulently with The Golden Age (2000) and included three of the most outstanding American historical novels of all time: Burr, 1876 and Lincoln. Personally, I was more an admirer of the brilliantly outrageous Hollywood comedy Myra Breckinridge and its sequel Myron. Duluth was also a joy to read.

His gay novel The City & The Pillar was incredibly daring for 1948 (and almost destroyed his reputation); the re-write in 1965, with its less melodramatic ending, was an improvement but the book was no longer ahead of its time. Charlton Heston was not told (and later refused to believe) that there was a homo-erotic 'subtext' to Judah Ben Hur's friendship with Stephen Boyd's Messala in Vidal's (uncredited) contributions to the Oscar-nominated screenplay. Gore's script for Suddenly, Last Summer (1960) added more great lines (and the splendid madhouse scenes) to Tennessee William's provocative one-act play and gave Elizabeth Taylor one of her best roles.

His best-remembered quotes include such gems as "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." and "No good deed goes unpunished." Here's one of my favourites: "There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.".

It doesn't have to be true but it reads well. Gore's life was like that.