Just got an amazing review for Down the River from Ulysses at Queer Sci Fi:
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The Review
Anyone who ever read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City will appreciate this book. An episodic story of a motley group of friends in Sacramento (River City—a nickname I never knew), Down the River doesn’t have a plot so much as a gentle, insightful narrative of these people’s lives, both individual and shared, over the course of a fairly short timespan.
The people are old and young, of various ethnicities, orientations and genders. They mostly know each other, and their lives intersect in all sorts of ways, big and small. There is a tragedy that comes to unify everyone, while it also sparks a little thread of magic that works its way through the entire story. If there’s a common theme that crosses the book, it’s food—the love of cooking and the power of food to comfort and bring people together. The centerpiece of the mise en scène is a popular Sacramento restaurant called Ragazzi, run by a middle-aged Italian-born gay couple.
I don’t want to name any one character, because there are a lot of them and they all matter. Scott Coatsworth has kindly placed a list of everyone at the front, and I found myself referring to it frequently until I’d gotten familiar with everyone.
There’s no big action here; it is a story of life unrolling, of community supporting its members; of love and loss and healing and the discovery of unexpected joy.
Maybe it’s my fond memories of Maupin’s series; maybe it’s just my time of life and the nostalgia that arises inevitably as I look back over my seventy years. Whatever the reason, I was moved to tears more than once by the folks in this book, because everything seemed to spark a memory, or a familiar resonance, with my own lived experience.
I don’t remember feeling that way as I read the various books in the Tales of the City series. Then again, I hadn’t lived very much of my life yet when I read those books.
5 stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.