Book Review : Boy and Girl Meet, Mate for Money in Gay Manhattan

Blue Heaven by Joe Keenan (Penguin: $7.95; 280 pages)

Try to imagine a remake of Frank Capra’s “A Pocketful of Miracles,” directed by Harvey Fierstein as homage to Noel Coward, with cheerful borrowings from “Some Like It Hot” and “The Sting” and even a faint echo of “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”--and you’ll begin to get the flavor of Joe Keenan’s fast, funny, knowing and relentlessly hip, comic novel, “Blue Heaven.”

“Blue Heaven” is the unlikely tale of the feigned love affair of Gilbert Selwyn, a sorta-wanna-be gay novelist, and Moira Finch, a resourceful fortune-hunter whom Keenan describes as a “mercenary, cold-blooded bundle of affectations” and “just about the lowest form of life you could see without a really expensive microscope.”

Sharing the Wealth

Gilbert and Moira decide to get married in an elaborate scheme to extract a share of the wealth of the families into which their respective mothers have recently married--Gilley’s momma is married to a stylish Mafia don, Moira’s mater acquired a title by wedding an English duke.

They enlist a struggling lyricist named Philip Cavanaugh--Gilley’s lover and the author’s alter ego--in the perilous enterprise, which builds to a comic-opera climax of a dozen sizzling subplots, including miscellaneous sexual liaisons, multilateral blackmail, the invention of a marvelous new perfume with rather bizarre side effects and bloody murder.

What makes “Blue Heaven” unique--and sometimes shocking--is its setting in the mercilessly chic, gratuitously exotic and thoroughly gay circles of contemporary Manhattan. In fact, I must confess that I often felt myself to be inadequate to its very hipness. What, I wondered, is “a cruise”? (I know from the context of the novel that Keenan is not talking about the kind that requires a boat.)

And Keenan makes up a lot of parodied but plausible settings around Manhattan--a restaurant called the Jaded Palate, a catering service called Master Race Caterers, a gourmet survivalist food company called Jour Apres Dinners--but sometimes I questioned exactly where real life ends and art begins. Maybe, I thought, there really is an after-hours hang-out called Marilyn’s Grave?

Sex With Strangers

Keenan indulges himself in an abundance of gay sexual fantasy, mostly about carefree sex with strangers. Virtually every waiter in “Blue Heaven” is young, handsome, homosexual and sexually available--and we get to see an awful lot of them, since much of the story unfolds in miscellaneous bars, restaurants, parties, receptions and other catered affairs. But the author utters not a word about AIDS or “safe sex,” and he allows himself only a single moment of serious propaganda for the cause of gay liberation. Startlingly, he puts the message in the mouth of an aging Mafia don whose peculiar style of doing away with the corpses of his tortured and murdered rivals at his dog food factory has earned him the nickname of Freddy the Pooch:

“I am happy to see that in my lifetime . . . the gay boys got tired of being punched so they stopped hiding,” says Freddy the Pooch, most implausibly.

Clever Patter, Plotting

Keenan’s fast-lane patter and Byzantine plotting are enough to grab our attention and hold it fast, even if there is a certain inevitability to the whole affair and especially its Grand Guignol climax. (Keenan’s web of conspiracies is faintly reminiscent of Richard Condon’s surrealistic urban morality tales--but Condon would never allow himself to slip into the odd moments of sentimentality that Keenan displays toward various of his own characters and their aspirations to be clever and entertaining but also decent and lovable.)

“We don the caps and bells,” says Philip Cavanaugh of himself and his lover, “and do our damnedest to be bright and charming and witty.” And so Joe Keenan writes a telling dust-jacket blurb for his own book.