Donna Minkowitz began contributing to the Village Voice in the late 1980s; a piece she wrote about the Brandon Teena story was credited by director Kimberly Peirce with inspiring the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry. Minkowitz has won awards for her nonfiction, written a restaurant column for Gay City News, and published a couple of other books that drew on memoir and fantasy before her latest volume, Donnaville, came out this fall.
Minkowitz brings her complex experience, both personal and political, to bear in the remarkable narrative, which reads somewhat like a fusion of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and steamy gay porn. Now 60, she has described herself as a “queer elder” and a pantheist; as a Yale grad, she’s steeped in the literary theory that upended English graduate studies in the 1980s, and she’s been pretty thoroughly therapized by both useful and annoying shrinks, as she points out in her introduction.
Donnaville takes place in a fictionalized version of Beacon, New York, the upstate town where Minkowitz has lived for some years with her wife. But it’s really set in a city in her mind, where various fragments of her personality wander around, work in commercial kitchens, sit abjectly in prison, torture the prisoners, cruise for sex and pleasure, and both assault and protect a small hapless child, a stand-in for, you guessed it, Donna herself, labeled “the city’s most important prisoner.”
The story is a soup of psychology and fantasy, melding therapy and adventure.
The characters (conveniently enumerated in a list at the front of the book) include these prisoners, their jailers (primarily, a nameless, neurotic nebbish who’s the head torturer and “can’t remember his real name”), a horse and a couple of flying llamas, a bunch of vampires, some goddess figures (especially, Magna, the Divine Mother, who “exists both within Donna and outside her”), and a rat named Hornblower. All of them speak and some can shapeshift and pass through walls at will. Their bodies talk to them. Metaphors run wild. It’s a Herculean undertaking, what Minkowitz is up to here, and was often exhausting to this reader because there’s so much to keep track of, like playing three-dimensional chess — everything and everyone is up for grabs in her space-time continuum. It kind of depends on how invested you get in the interior life and psychic history of Donna Minkowitz. As for the exterior life, the characters can conjure the perfect outfit for any occasion with a trick of thought.
But perseverance pays off. Once you accept the premise that we are not in Kansas anymore (or in her native Brooklyn, or wherever ordinary daily life unfolds), the choppiness with which events take place becomes a feature, not a bug. The calligraphed map of Donnaville on the book’s burgundy cover is not much help, since the real landscape, she reminds us, is all in her mind. If situations threaten to grow sticky or violent, magic intervenes, as when the very perceptive horse, Falhófnir, “jumps straight into the space where the boy was standing, through a neat curve he makes in spacetime,” loads endangered characters onto his back, and spirits them away.
If you have the patience to stay there, you’ll find great pleasure in Donnaville, where things get very messy but then magically resolve. It’s a soup of psychology and fantasy, melding therapy and adventure in ways that bring a reader right to the edge of despair, as a platoon of vengeful men, former prison guards in sparkly black uniforms, goose-steps down Minkowitz Boulevard, the main drag of this riverside town, delivering us through a conflagration of liberation involving fire and explosions to the sunny, peaceful, intimate environment of a town reborn. If she sells her book to the movies, it will definitely become an animated film.
Love and homemade treats conquer all, and leave me wondering what else Minkowitz has up her sleeve. You can’t speed-read this book, whose 200 pages took me weeks to summit, getting lost periodically in detours involving bodily description and sexual juice. But the game is worth the candle, especially at our current desperate moment. ❖
Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.
