I Am Not Raymond Wallace

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PLEASE NOTE: From 1st of July 2021, shipments from the UK to EU countries will be subject to Value Added Tax (VAT) charges. It's unclear to me what purpose this novel serves, other than to reinforce an outdated narrative that featured privileged protagonists who had the luxury of a closet. Raymond Wallace, a recent graduate of Cambridge of age 21, arrives in NYC in the summer of 1963 for a 3-month internship with the NY Times.

Like so many men of his time and of his kind, Raymond faces a choice between conformity, courage and compartmentalisation. I’d already spotted Sam Kenyon’s I Am Not Raymond Wallace in the schedules when it was pitched to me for review, struck by its blurb. I strongly identified with the way that the internalised homophobia was portrayed and how it played out. On an undercover assignment, a secret world is revealed to Raymond: a world in which he need no longer pretend to be something or someone he cannot be; a world in which he meets Joey.Kenyon does a nice job recreating the pre-Stonewall milieu and there are some nice touches to the story. I Am not Raymond Wallace is a multi-stranded story of queer redemption spanning multiple generations, told with precision-tooled prose, sharply-imagined settings and compassionately-observed characterisation. A "historical" novel that starts in 1963 with some looks back and an epilogue that is set in modern times. So begins a relationship which sees Raymond becoming part of a family very different from his own at home in Britain.

It is against this recontextualization that Sam Kenyon has written his debut novel, I am not Raymond Wallace, a story about closeted cis men set largely in 1963. This in no way makes me more likely to give the book a glowing review because when we used to sit together in school orchestra, he was quite annoying. This history cannot be forgotten by younger generations, just like forgetting that abortion was once illegal and resulted in many tragedies (oh yeah, that's changed hasn't it). I couldn't put this book down, I had to make myself when I had things to do, otherwise I would have sat in one place until I finished it. Opening in 1963, it follows a Cambridge undergraduate, fresh out of college, who’s won a three-month bursary at The New York Times and meets the love of his life.He soon discovers his elusive boss, Bukowski, is being covertly blackmailed by an estranged wife, and that he himself is to assist the straight-laced Doty on an article about the ‘explosion of overt homosexuality’ in the city. As his bursary draws to a close, he’s faced with a choice which we know from the start he will regret. The Raymond's controlling mother arrives to spend a couple of days with him at the end of his internship and accompany him home.