Book reviews: ‘The Disappearers’ and ‘American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump’

‘The Disappearers’ by Marlon James

“Why not just say it?” asked Dwight Garner in The New York Times. With his sixth book in an already decorated career, Marlon James “has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” At 600- plus pages, The Disappearers is “a maximalist’s banquet” constructed from a simple story premise: In 1988 Jamaica, several closeted gay men are rehearsing a play in a house in Kingston when a homophobic mob storms in, killing one victim, blinding another, brutally beating the rest, and leaving the survivors forever changed. Still, “it’s hard to talk about this novel because there are at least two dozen ways to pick it up,” whether you’re interested in what James, a Jamaican native, has to say about violence, sex, pop culture, gay feeling, revenge, exile, or fathers and sons. The book “sank knives deep into my heart,” and “I’m still in recovery from it.”

Two young men, Eddy Porteus and Jordan Brown, hold the center of this “unforgettable” work, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Eddy and Jordan aren’t friends exactly,” and up until the mob attack, their experiences of Jamaica’s virulent homophobia vary significantly. But when two other members of the acting troupe vanish after leaving the hospital, they team up to find them. Throughout the book, as in his previous novels, James “invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. And as the story drifts to Miami, London, New York, and back to Kingston again, it’s held together by James’ passion for the era’s pop culture and his characters’ will to survive in the face of hatred. Thanks to its sweep and power, it’s a novel that “will be read decades from now, pored over in seminars and bookmarked on subway commutes.”

While “there’s no denying” that The Disappearers is a great novel, it’s “also an ordeal,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. It “aspires to sear in the minds of readers the horrors of living in a world hostile to homosexuality,” and in that, it’ll succeed. But “James’ commitment to erotic realism, to the mechanics of oral and anal sex, voluntary and violent, is total and relentless,” and the book is in part “an encyclopedia of abuse and degradation.” I finished it “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it.” Even so, “what’s most surprising, given the book’s abiding terrors, is how James inches it erratically toward the light,” providing late glimpses of a few gay characters who not only survive but thrive. It’s easy to imagine that this “incomparable” work will be a beacon to more than a few young readers enduring violent hatred wherever it arises today.

‘American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump’ by Kai Bird

“I gobbled up every page of Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel,” said Laura Miller in Slate, “and I’m not sure how I feel about that.” The book’s subject, lawyer Roy Cohn, was a mobbed-up liar and cheater who helped manufacture the postwar Red Scare, assisted in sending Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair, demonized homosexuals despite being gay himself, and eventually mentored the young Donald Trump. Bird, who co- authored American Prometheus, the award-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, this time teamed with his researcher wife, Susan Goldmark, to create a book that’s “a cornucopia of mid-century sleaze and addictive for just that reason.” It’s a story packed with “Mafia hits and blackmail and election tampering,” and because Trump’s resentful populism mirrors Cohn’s, it’s a tale that’s “turned out to be seminal in American politics.”

“In Bird’s telling, the parallels between Cohn and Trump begin with their childhoods,” said Kim Phillips-Fein in The Atlantic. Both grew up in outer-borough New York City, and both had well-connected fathers who helped launch their careers. After the Bronx-bred Cohn helped prosecute the Rosenbergs, he teamed with U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy to mount a sweeping anti-Communist hunt. When a backlash sent him back to New York, he was repeatedly indicted but eluded criminal conviction. After meeting Trump in 1973, he schooled the future president in certain rules of the power game, including answering every attack with a counterattack and never admitting wrongdoing.

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In his long-ago heyday, “Roy Cohn made for good copy,” said Philip Terzian in The Wall Street Journal. But while Bird’s book reviews Cohn’s colorful career in great detail, “all the entertaining stories are spoiled in the service of an underlying thesis—Cohn as linchpin of modern conservative politics—that grows less persuasive with repetition.” Cohn in fact held national power only briefly, and his transactional later friendship with Trump “scarcely” qualifies as formative. Clearly, while Cohn’s historic significance remains slight, “his status as a menacing specter in the minds of liberal journalists has only grown.”