Henry Henry – Allen Bratton

[Unnamed; 2024]

“It was like Oscar Wilde had said: to have one queer in the line of succession was a tragedy, to have two looked like there was something fucking wrong with your family.” Whatever Oscar Wilde actually said, Allen Bratton’s debut novel Henry Henry is definitely about queers and succession. The novel is almost entirely focalized through Hal—heir to a crumbling legacy, a few mansions, and a dubiously meaningful title, “Duke of Lancaster.” A breezy, aphoristic, omniscient narrator follows Hal through pre-Brexit London on bus rides, at parties, in restaurants, and around his father’s various domiciles. We also follow Hal to Catholic mass, where he routinely makes confession and occasionally struggles not to puke up a communion wafer the morning after a bender. Hal’s legacy is complicated materially, à la Oscar Wilde, by being gay. Emotionally, it’s complicated by his father’s sexual abuse, which started when Hal was fourteen and continues over the course of the novel. The dread and longing Hal feels towards his father are tied up in literal and metaphorical relationships with the property he’s set to inherit:

Down the street, Hal saw his father’s house, which even at that distance he could imagine himself inside and a part of, continuous with the worn stair runners and the spiderwebs in the cellar, the uneven floors and the warped eighteenth-century window glass. The house was his body outside of his body, and if he had a choice not to go into his body, he wouldn’t do that either.

The house will always belong to his father even if he grew up in it and will one day own it himself. The house is also Hal’s body, an uncanny space made of history but also leaden with an unstoppable future. “Why didn’t I just knock him down?” Hal wonders to himself in the middle of the novel, “Why didn’t I just kill him? Now that I’m tall and strong, now that I’m a man. But he wasn’t a man, he was Henry’s son.”

Loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henry V, Hal is a twenty-something slob with bad social skills. Hal maintains an aloof, socially acceptable relationship with his father. He shows up at the members-only dining club where Henry frequently invites him without a suit jacket. He must be supplied one by the obliging staff, who thankfully find him just charming enough to get away with it. Of course, the institutions Hal’s family frequents sound awful. One restaurant is “such a perfectly oppressive recreation of what it had been like in the 1850s that it seemed wrong for women to be there.” (There are many moments in the novel like this, where the narrator melds into what we assume is Hal’s own critical perspective, but also maybe the author’s). Hal is just as bratty among his peers. He holds court at parties but his jokes often fall flat—not because they aren’t funny, but because they are just a little too mean. Hal loves men and, while often a source of guilt, Hal’s sexual orientation is not a source of personal confusion. The reason he’s never been in a relationship isn’t because he’s unattractive or figuring it out, but because he has such a bad personality. Sexy but not beautiful, smart but not promising, “Nobody liked Hal when they first met him, unless it was a man who wanted to fuck him or a girl who wanted to marry him.”

While Henry Henry makes the British aristocracy look bad, it isn’t quite a satire. In an interview for the Vancouver Public Library, Bratton—originally from Virginia, USA—says that while he was living in England, he became obsessed with the role of royalty in everyday life. What was going on here? How much power does this system still have and how does it affect people? Bratton asks these questions in earnest and Henry Henry, among many things, is a testament to the meticulously researched road to answering them. The novel was born from study, rather than first-hand experience, which makes sense of a strange lilt it carries throughout. Bratton isn’t English! But the novel is so English. Or is it? As a non-English person, I was plagued by this question. There was no way for me to know if the author was being true to his subject, or what that would even mean. (The Guardian gave the novel a solid review, so it must at least be English-passing?) It’s pretty funny to cos-play the English elite, but it’s also impossible not to think about how badly it would land if this same literary strategy was used to describe, well, almost any other population. Similar questions are at play with respect to the novel’s Catholic theme. Is this a good representation of Catholic guilt? Do Catholics really lapse into dissociative reveries about what it would have been like to be Christ hauling his cross? These questions never resolved for me as a reader, but it helped to think about the novel as an exercise in rigorous fan fiction.

Besides, there were long stretches of Henry Henry where I didn’t think about any of this, where questions of authenticity faded into the background. What surfaced was a very compelling depiction of what it’s like to be a person in time. Particularly a young one who has been through a lot and is thigh-deep in figuring out who he might become. The novel’s balance between scenic description, inner monologues, and dialogue keeps the book moving quickly. The voices of the characters are fun and distinct, if sometimes a little too quippy to be believable. Genre-wise, this is a straight-forward Bildungsroman and, while much of Bratton’s English-style humor is funny, Henry Henry shines when it leans fully into its earnestness. Deeply indebted to Edward St. Aubyn’s masterpiece Patrick Melrose novels (published in England between 1992–2011), Henry Henry is about a family with something very fucking wrong with it. Hal shares a lot with Patrick: heirs to decaying fortunes, cutting wit, hard to love, too smart for their own good. They both do a lot of drugs and were both raped by their gothic and miserable fathers. But where Patrick’s father is singularly a force of tyrannical brutality, Hal’s relationship with his father isn’t so straightforward.

Hal’s sexual relationship with his dad is first alluded to in a sex scene between Hal and a casual partner, Falstaff. As Falstaff gives Hal a blowjob, Hal asks him to berate him in the voice of his father (Henry). But it doesn’t work. Hal takes over Henry’s role himself: “You’ve turned away from God,” Hal ventriloquizes as he jerks off, kneeling over Falstaff on the couch, “You’ve done worse. You’ve spat in God’s face. God help me, but I pray sometimes to find out you were never my son.” Hal comes on Falstaff’s stomach. This is one of the novel’s first scenes. We don’t find out until several chapters later that Hal actually is having sex with his father. At this point, we’re already acquainted with Henry’s sick antics—he cancels Hal’s credit cards when Hal avoids his phone calls, so that he’ll come home where Henry can have him close. Henry’s manipulation, plus the dad role-play sex scene, make the news of the abuse land especially hard. It would be easier, for the reader and for Hal, if sex with Henry was purely awful. Instead, Hal feels a combination of disgust and desire, a sense of being trapped and a sense of fulfilling destiny. If it’s difficult that Hal doesn’t like having sex with his father, it’s unbearable that a part of him does:

There was nothing holding Hal in place but a sense that he should be here, his shoulders and the back of his head against the wall, his mouth slightly open . . . Hal’s blood moved: his fingers and toes went clumsily numb, his face glowed hot, his prick was hard in the miserable way it sometimes had been during morning prayers at school, or when a doctor listened to his lungs with a stethoscope pressed to his bare skin.

The reader’s discomfort is aligned with Hal’s. “Hal wasn’t sure if what he felt was pleasure, or what pleasure was.” Against the reader’s wishes, Hal doesn’t get catharsis. He doesn’t get his father locked up. And while he admits to a lover that he was abused as a child, he doesn’t ever tell anyone—at least not in the pages of the novel—that it was his father who did it or that this confusing abuse is still a part of his life. What is beautiful about the book, and perhaps more real than the dramatic revenge I craved for this character, is that Hal, in the thick of his pain and reckoning, falls in love.

So, two plots run parallel and sometimes meet each other. As Hal grapples with his father, his family, and his legacy, Henry Henry follows the arc of a classic romantic comedy. Hal meets Percy (also loosely based on Shakespeare’s Harry Percy aka Hotspur) at a party. Like Hal, Percy also kind of sucks. But differently. Percy is a hot, successful jock with a spiritual side. He’s also rich, but new-money, the heir to a much more practical oil company. Percy is that feminist guy, a mostly theoretical bisexual who probably has prayer bead bracelets and does a lot of community service to manage his privilege guilt. As much as you’d like to hate him, you can’t because he’s so earnest. Hal does manage to hate him, though. Hal hates Percy so much that you know immediately he will fall in love with him.

First they get shitfaced at a party and have a huge fight that culminates in Percy convincing Hal to go to his long-dead mother’s memorial in Wales. Then Percy invites Hal on a grouse hunt at his manor and accidentally shoots him in the face, which reveals to Percy that he’s into Hal. The first time they fuck is sweet, silly and hot: a sharp contrast to the macabre, gothic atmosphere of Hal’s relationship with his father and to his rote encounters with Falstaff. Percy is a clumsy kisser and jerks Hal off “in the determined manner of a teenager masturbator.” When Percy fucks, he mutters porny stock phrases. It works. Hal shoves Percy’s cum-covered fingers into his own mouth. When Hal goes down on him, Percy “started treating Hal the way Hal liked,” roughly. Good sex is much less about skill than it is about vulnerability. Bratton shows how chemistry is a combination of the mysterious conditions that allow you to be desperate in the arms of another and vice versa. This is the kind of sex that is as painful as it is pleasurable. Painful because it forces you to see yourself for you who are, your life for what it is. For Hal—whose sexuality is tied up with his father’s abuse—this kind of sex is especially poignant. After fucking Percy, he thinks: “Here he was, flying forwards into the next minute and the next, closer and closer to the terrible moment when he would have to give up and become himself.”

What’s important about Bratton’s rendering of sex isn’t just that it’s true to life, but that it paints a complex portrait of a person with a dark sexual history. An NYT review of the novel, horrifically, criticized the book’s nuance precisely because the protagonist is a victim of abuse. “Sure, Hal’s self-aware about his conduct, but he doesn’t seem to have agency over it, and thus lacks that Shakespearean moral complexity.” This an unfortunately common take. Characters who have been abused are forgiven for their bad behavior, but not bestowed with agency over it. That would be too disturbing for the reader. But Bratton keeps giving Hal agency regardless. “It was the deep cleaning you did before getting fucked,” Bratton writes, “that proved the sin was committed with full knowledge and consent.” Hal is a mess, but he’s also a lover coming hard into age as best he can.

Falling in love with Percy helps Hal grow up. The moments in the novel when Hal seems to be evolving most meaningfully are linked to working through what his father did to him. Hal finds himself taking care of his friend’s drunk sister after a party and considers his own power over her. He thinks about how vulnerable she is, how he could do anything to her. The thought melts into a new understanding of what was done to him by the man who should most have protected him. This is also one of the first times in the book, outside of sex scenes, when Hal is sweet to another person. It’s wintertime and he makes sure that the drunk sister, sleeping it off on his couch, has enough blankets and sweaters to keep her warm. Before going to work, he thinks about closing the window. But “Hal wouldn’t close the window: he would be shutting her in.”

After Hal’s father marries a multilingual heiress, the novel—which up to this point I’d read in two rapt couch sessions—drags on till the end. I wished that the novel had ended a hundred pages earlier, the night before Henry’s wedding when Hal and his gaggle of siblings take MDMA together and swim in a lake. The scene reminds me of a moment in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, when Tess and a group of villagers walk along a moonlit road after a dance. In two novels governed by forlorn plots, so focused on selfhood and the irreparable errors people make, these scenes offer respite from the high-risk myth of individuality. Instead of going to sleep, Hal and his brothers and sisters sit around in the kitchen in their pajamas drinking hot whisky. “They kept looking at their phones and saying, ‘Oh gosh, it’s late,’ and agreeing to go up in a minute, then after a minute looking at their phones and seeing an hour had passed. By the time they really did go, it was late enough that if they worked the land they owned they would just be getting up.”

Olivia Durif writes cultural criticism, personal essays, reported pieces and book reviews. She lives in New Mexico.