Description Where to Buy Excerpt Praise Nominated for a 26th Annual 2007 Northern California Book Award Fiction: The Beheading Game by Brenda Webster DESCRIPTION Flamboyant New York theatre director Ren is passionately in love with Jack, a younger man who is still under the thumb of his conservative CEO father, Malcolm. Jack's differences with his father range from the fact that Jack is still in the closet regarding his sexuality to having to endure his father's platitudes about self-improvement and his contempt for Ren. The fact that his father's oil company is dumping toxic waste into the Hudson River doesn't help since cleaning up the river is one of Jack's missions in life. Tensions mount when Jack becomes critically ill with lymphoma and has to undergo a bone marrow transplant which will either cure him or kill him. At the same time that Ren is tending to Jack in the hospital, he is busy staging his version of "Gawain and the Green Knight." His struggles with Malcolm over Jack's love lead Ren to question the values of the medieval story--especially the blind loyalty of the young vassal to his lord--and he ends by inverting these feudal values in a wild cross-gendered sail against the currents of History. Behind this shift in dramaturgy is Ren's gradual realization that the battles that count for him as a modern (loving) man are fought by changing bedpans and bandages, not waving lances and swords. Life and theatre become intertwined as Ren increasingly lives his life as drama, enacting ever more baroque--and occasionally risky--fantasies of revenge and Love's Triumph. Beyond the ambiguities of gender and sexual orientation, The Beheading Game finds that the issues of love and death, honesty and loyalty, are the same for all of us. Hardcover, 247 pages. ISBN 0916727246 (Wings Press, February 2006) Back to the index WHERE TO BUY --Wings Press Order through Small Press Distribution, 1341 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA 94710-1409; Tel 510-524-1668; Fax 510-524-0852; www.spdbooks.org --Amazon.com --Barnes and Noble --Walmart --SPD Books Back to the index EXCERPT --Courtesy of The Alsop Review Back to the index PRAISE SPD Books THE BEHEADING GAME, the newest novel by the acclaimed Brenda Webster, tells the tale of a flamboyant New York theatre director named Ren, a still closeted homosexual under the thumb of his conservative CEO father, Malcolm, juxtaposing Ren's struggles to break free of paternal tutelage with Ren's revisionary staging of "Gawain and the Green Knight." Riffing off that play's trumpeting of blind loyalty by young vassals to their lords, the novel leads us to question what it means to be true to oneself as an individual in our own time. The Pacific Sun POSSESSIVE LOVE Gay son is the object of a rivalry between his father and lover By CARY JAMES March 3-9, 2006 In the medieval epic Gawain and the Green Knight, a monstrous knight, all in green, appears at King Arthur's Camelot. Anyone there may chop off his head, if, a year later, the green knight may do the same to him. Of all Arthur's brave knights, only Gawain will take up his apparently fatal challenge. The Green Knight" combines several motifs from older folk tales, and this challenge to Gawain, apparently based on a ninth-century Irish epic, has been called "The Beheading Game." In Brenda Webster's new novel, The Beheading Game, that ancient theme of honor and death runs like a bass rhythm under a modern story of love, suffering, deceit and ownership. Webster, who lives in Berkeley, is president of PEN American Center West, and has written a number of nonfiction books. The Beheading Game is her third novel. Webster's characters are always vital and believable, and the people in this book are no different. Each of them comes alive on the page with remarkable vividness, each is complicated, changeable and inconsistent, each is a real person in a real world. The novel's protagonist, Ren, 45, an actor and first-time director in New York City, is rehearsing his new stage version of The Green Knight. We see the story from Ren's point of view and he reveals himself as a marvelously vivid character, both self-assured and self-doubting, a man comfortable with being gay and yet not quite sure how to play the role. He is capable of sacrifice and even abnegation, yet he also has a preening ego and a determined will. Ren is very much alive, and not entirely admirable. Ren is in love with Jack, a younger man in the grip of a cancer that sounds like lymphoma. Jack's chemotherapy has not been successful, and now he must undergo an agonizing T-cell transplant. Because of his illness, and his youth, Jack is often a passive figure, and all through the novel Ren treads the fine line between love and possessiveness. Jack, however, is very certain about one thing. He will do nothing to offend his father Malcolm who, he insists, "is only trying to do his best." Malcolm is the third side of the novel's triangle. Jack's father is a businessman and author, successful enough to have a Park Avenue address, willfully blind to the relationship between his son and Ren, and completely resistant to the notion Jack might be gay. Malcolm is as close as Webster comes to a stock character, a man obsessed with image, with his "upright posture and silver hair." He has predictable expectations for his children--unhappy that Jack became an ecologist trying to protect the Hudson River fisheries, not pleased that Jack's sister Henny wants to take a master's in education, when history or literature has much more prestige. This struggle with Jack's domineering father becomes, for Ren, a continuing, rancorous contest. Ren never states it so plainly, but his rivalry with Malcolm is really about possession. Both he and Malcolm have Jack's love. Which will win his allegiance? Jack is afraid to reveal his gayness to his father, and this makes Ren's struggle even more Byzantine. During Jack's transplant ordeal the advantage shifts to Ren--he was clearly the more caring. But Malcolm insists that afterward, during recuperation, Jack must live in his apartment, and under his thumb. Still, through the long weeks of Jack's suffering, Ren has been able to prepare his new Green Knight. It becomes a major off-Broadway triumph--even earns a rave in the Times. A theatrical producer from Rome offers to fund a production there, and when Ren accepts he knows he must take Jack with him. From this point on Ren's conflict with Malcolm is about nothing but power. No public figure is without private faults. Ren manages to get the dirt on Malcolm, though the form of this "dirt" felt like a cliche. Ren blackmails Malcolm. Malcolm allows Jack to go to Rome and even helps with their finances. Once in Rome everything seems idyllic. Until Jack learns what Ren has done. In his adaptation of the Green Knight Ren changed the ending--when Gawain and the green knight's wife fall in love, they ignore the medieval code of honor. Ren calls it patriarchal misogyny. The Beheading Game ends in much the same way--love conquers both medical crises and moral scruples. Brenda Webster has given us a strong and thoughtful portrait of gay life, and of the trials of caring for the desperately ill; the novel is a worthy addition to her impressive body of work. OUT Magazine By EMILY DRABINSKI Anyone who has done a stretch of psychotherapy will tell you that life is pretty much a decades-long project of reckoning with our parents. Webster deftly portrays the agony and potential ecstasy of a son coming to terms with his father in this contemporary gay romance. Ren's closeted lover, Jack, lies fighting for his life in a New York City cancer ward as Ren mounts a production of the medieval fable Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Onstage, Gawain must behead his father and then slay his ghost. At home, Ren must help Jack vanquish his overbearing father--and the ghost of his own--so that both can survive. Webster subtly interweaves the theatrical and the real on her way to a final conflagration that is truly shocking, as these battles always are. Washington Blade LOVE IN UNUSUAL PLACES A heterosexual grandmother of five writes a detailed novel about gay men battling love, lymphoma and homophobia. By KATHERINE VOLIN Feb. 17, 2006 HOW DOES A straight grandmother end up writing a gay male love story? Not intentionally, in the case of Brenda Webster, a 69-year-old writer from Berkeley, Calif. Prior to writing The Beheading Game, Webster's biggest departure from non-fiction writing was a "basically autobiographical" novel, she says. In addition to that novel, Webster has also written two critical studies of poetry, a memoir and edited the journals of her mother, abstract expressionist painter Ethel Schwabacher. "This is a real take-off in that there is no obvious connection to my life," Webster says. Plenty more subtle connections exist, however. Moving from memoir-based writing to a gay love story may sound like a giant leap, but the concept evolved slowly from two stories of personal interest to Webster: the epic alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and her friend's struggle with lymphoma. Her work with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight became especially personal as a graduate student when Webster wrote a Freudian analysis of the 14th-century poem. "None of the medievalists that I sent this paper to appreciated it," Webster says. "I still was obsessed with the story. I was upset, since I liked the story so much, that women had such a bad part in it." Webster started writing The Beheading Game as a way to re-examine the poem from a female perspective. Her book, named after one of the plots in the poem, began as a story of Gawain's sister taking over his armor after his death. "After about 150 pages, I saw that I was writing a feminist track, and it was humorless and didactic - in short, it was boring," Webster says. "So I threw it out." In the meantime, one of Webster's closest female friends had been diagnosed with lymphoma and was considering a stem-cell transplant. "The emotional strength of my involvement with her catalyzed something and made me realize I could put the two things together," Webster says. Put the two together she did. The Beheading Game tells the story of a New York theater director, Ren, who is in the midst of staging a production of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ren is in love with Jack, a closeted younger man with a tyrant father, who falls ill with lymphoma. As Ren struggles with caring for Jack while interacting with his father, he looks to the values of heroism and loyalty that he finds within Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to guide him. WRITING THE BOOK was part of the healing process for Webster and her friend, the author says. "I was writing her trauma, and that made her feel better," Webster says. Using a gay couple instead of a heterosexual couple allowed for a more even playing field, she says. "It's sort of also about sharing power," Webster says. Although using a same-sex relationship as a literary device appealed to her, Webster says that a relationship between two women would have been too autobiographical. "People asked why I didn't use two women and that would have been too close [to reality]," Webster says. " What I really needed was an androgynous person - not a man or woman, but someone who had elements of both. We're all androgynous in my opinion." To research the gay characters, Webster, who has plenty of gay male friends, says that she read an assortment of gay books, including all of Edmund White's. "I did a lot of reading and reading fiction gives you a very good idea of what's going on," Webster says. "I steered away from much sexual description, because that I don't know, but I can deal with love." MORE PRAISE "The Beheading Game is an affecting love story that combines a variety of unusual elements. The terror of loss, the pain of seeing a loved one suffer, the struggle against prejudice, impulses of jealous rage, and an intricate play between theatricality and authenticity are all brought together in a compelling narrative where hope comes persuasively to triumph over fear. " --Robert Alter author of Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age "Webster's new novel takes us on a tour of the labyrinths of desire and dread in which the games of love are played out. Her daring juxtaposition of the medieval romance of Gawain and the Green Knight with thoroughly contemporary dramas of gender bending gives her tale special, mythic resonance." --Sandra Gilbert author of The Madwoman in the Attic and No Man's Land: Sex Changes: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century "Who would have thought that Gawain and the Green Knight could lend itself to such a brilliant--and thoroughly contemporary--retelling? In Webster's astute, comic narrative, Gawain is a gay theater director in love with a young man whose CEO father cannot tolerate his son's homosexuality. In this complex triangle, where love does battle with fear, betrayal, humiliation and rage, tragedy seems inevitable. How Webster avoids such a conclusion, deftly re-writing the Gawain story in the process, is a marvel of novelistic art and human understanding." --Madelon Sprengnether author of Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir Back to the index