Finlater

By Shawn Stewart Ruff

A coming of age love story set in racially charged Cincinnati in the 1970s. Meet Cliffy Douglas as he develops a friendship with classmate Noah Baumgarten. One Black and one Jewish they are drawn to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1604023953
• ISBN13: 9781604023954
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Quote Editions
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Whose life is this?

Having grown up in a trashy little all-white town in Oklahoma, I find it amazing that the author has created an urban Black adolescence that feels like my own life. His extraordinary sense of those telling details that comprise our most vivid memories make his story as vivid as your own recollections. Amazing, erotic, and sometimes unbearably honest.

Book explores carnal realms many publishers fear. Reviewed by Jim Bartley / Xtra.ca / Wednesday, Jul

It's the spring of '69 in Cincinnati. In the bathroom of a cramped house in a barren housing project, a black kid of 13 is soaking in the tub, hearing the screen door slam as a mystery guest is greeted by his mom. Moments before, Cliffy stood naked at the bathroom window watching a dark, nattilydressed man pull into the parking lot in a low-slung T-Bird. "He turned up our sidewalk.... Our eyes locked in the tug of gravity -- the little body me, the big body him, in a pull like the moon toward the earth or the earth toward the sun, or me toward fried chicken legs, my favourite thing in the world." Two pages in and I was hooked on this writing. Cosmic homoerotic magnetism and fried chicken legs? It's a giggle -- but so much more. We feel the swirling, unformed passions of a child teetering on the threshold of sexual awareness. A page later, the silk-shirted dude is standing over the toilet and Cliffy is mesmerized. "His thick gold-ringed fingers unpacked his privates from tight black polyester pants. He maneuvered it until a red head came out." The guy turns out to be Cliffy's dad, absent for a decade. He pisses a golden stream, repacks his tool, then hoists Cliffy up for a kiss on the cheek: "Give your old man some sugar." Dad decides to stick around for a while. He even gets a job, still managing to pull all-nighter debauches, stumbling into the kitchen next morning while Lacey (mom) is dispensing Sugar Crisp to her brood of three boys. At home dad is found mostly on the couch in his tight bikini briefs, watching TV and ordering beers and snacks from his grudgingly obedient sons. Lambda-shortlisted editor Shawn Stewart Ruff has given us a gem with this first novel, woven through with insights about oppression and prejudice, hurt and healing. Cliffy's first-person voice is surprisingly seductive. He's a convincing kid in every way while doubling as a near-flawless vehicle for his author's wisdom about pubescent boys and their surging sexuality. One scene, in which Cliffy is affectionately manhandled by his father on the couch, is intensely erotic. You see that both Clifford and Cliffy, dad and son, are briefly immersed in a sexual game that's over almost before it begins -- too soon even for them to acknowledge it. But we sense that dad is playing with fire. A few pages later Cliffy is riding double on the banana seat of his new friend's bicycle, his arms tightly around Noah's waist. The thrill of their erotic tug feels just right: "The wind flapped his shirt up. Sweaty hair vanished into Fruit of the Loom underwear elastic above the studs on his stained Big Hank jeans. Oil, mud, arm stink and Captain Crunch cereal swirled around me in tornados of smells." I instantly recalled that same cereal breath and boyish sweat wafting from my pals at summer camp. Cliffy and Noah later share an outdoor jerk session. It's the beginning of a love affair that pulls us deep inside their hormone-charged dance of discovery and desire. The sex is as tender and

Gay Teens Beautifully Represented

Ruff, Shawn Stewart. "Finlater", Quote Editions, 2008. Gay Teens Beautifully Represented Amos Lassen "Finlater" is quite simply an amazing book that deals with real people in real situations. It is beautifully written and extremely sensitive. It affected me in ways few other books have. Perhaps this is because of what I said earlier about the reality of the characters and plot. Cliffy is a thirteen year old black sensitive kid from a low-income family in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is entering the eight grade after having great success in a spelling bee where the only word he misspelled was the name of the housing project where he lived, The Findlater, and that was because he always heard it pronounced as "Finlater". His home life is somewhat sad--his brothers are sexually active and they cause trouble; his mother works hard to take care of the family. His father has recently returned home and doesn't do much aside from drinking and lounging around the house. Nevertheless Cliffy Douglas loves his mother and is devoted to her. When Cliffy starts school, his desk is near Noah Baumgerten's. Noah is a young Jewish student and the two boys become fast friends. The boys both belong to minority groups and they receive the terrible nicknames of "Jew" and "Nigger". As the boys get to know each other, they secretly wish that they could change home lives. Cliffy wants to have a loving home like Noah's and Noah wants to be a "soul brother". The friends spend all of their free time together and they explore their sexualities and bodies. Eventually the boys' families also meet and the boys begin to explore the secrets of each family and they study their fathers whose own lives greatly influence the boys' lives. The two boys manage to find their own world in which their pasts are blocked out and they are allowed to live and love. This is where the story ends and we are left to finish the book in the way that we want and for me this was a big plus as I became part of the plot. This is a love story with a lot of emotion. It could easily become a book for young adult readers but I see it as a book for all ages as it has so much to say about so many things. It is beautifully and eloquently written and physically beautiful to look at. This is a book that will not easily be forgotten and when Cliffy says that the only thing to be ashamed of is being ashamed, he won my heart.

A deeply humane and moving work

Full disclosure: I am listed in the acknowledgement of FINLATER as an early reader of the book. Second disclosure: I'm not a professional writer or reviewer, just a reader with some scattered background in history, LGBTQ studies, African American studies, librarianship, and education. The novel presents real people in a real place: people who grow, a place that is also in the throes of change. As with Ruff's short stories I've read, there were characters whom I wanted to hate, but he doesn't let the reader make those easy decisions. A famous author once said that the first rule of writing was never to humiliate your characters - a recommendation that Hollywood regularly ignores. But Ruff has the humane instinct to draw each character with honest sensitivity and understanding. Two comparisons could be useful - one is with Peter Cameron's acclaimed SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU. Superficially, one can say that Cameron's protagonist, James, is an 18-year-old, rich, white, Ivy League bound sensitive and smart New York City cynic; and Ruff's Cliffy is a 13-year-old low-income sensitive and smart black kid from Cincinnati. But there's something else that's different. In FINLATER, the stakes seem higher, but not falsely inflated - for starters, there's actually sex and genuine intimate feelings, desires and desperation, in Ruff's work. The family dysfunctions aren't just fodder for rolling one's eyes in embarrassment, but dangerous and real in their impact. In FINLATER, there are both well-off and poor, and the genuine desire of one to taste the other. On the other hand, both Cameron and Ruff share a charming restraint, letting their stories unfold and their characters emerge naturally. The fierceness in FINLATER is not forced, but Ruff's novel goes where Cameron's can't. Another comparison I can draw (and at least two other readers have drawn) is with James Baldwin. Here, you'll have to do some of the work yourself, because I can't put my finger on it exactly. Maybe it's the direct and honest presentation. Or the characters I want to care about. Or how both Ruff and Baldwin (at his best) can bring life to "issues" (race, sex, family, violence) that would simply be dead weight or shock-value trivia for lesser talents. Finally, the production value - the actual physical book - is outstanding, beautiful. That is, it's worthy of the story and people you'll find inside. It demands to be held and opened. And finally, finally: like Cameron's book (and even like much of Baldwin's work), there will be a temptation to make FINLATER a "YA" or young adult book. Cameron disagreed with his publisher and the book stores about marketing his book as a YA story. Ruff may find that his FINLATER has to face the same pressure to pigeonhole the book in this way. It's no surprise that fully adult readers - like myself - wish we could have been as wise and decent a teenager as Cliffy, eager to taste and see, ready to learn and grow, able to a

A Very Important New Writer: A Remarkably Sensitive First Novel

Shawn Stewart Ruff may be a name known to only a few avid readers of short stories, but with the publication of FINLATER this gifted writer is bound to be recognized as a very important voice in American literature. Few writers are able to relate a story from a child's vantage as keenly as Ruff: echoes of such writers as JD Salinger and Colm Toibin and JG Hayes are present in this tender little love story that offers finely honed insights into the impact of racial tensions on the sociologic changes of the 1970s. It is a book that deserves wide critical attention as well as a broad readership. The title FINLATER sets the tone of the message of this little treasure: the story takes place in the projects area of Cincinnati known as Findlater, but the main character and narrator of this tale is Cliffy Douglas, an African American 13-year-old lad who has just entered the eighth grade after success in a spelling bee where his only misspelled word was the name of his home zone he has always heard pronounced as 'Finlater'. Cliffy's home life is rocky - his brothers are raucous, early sexually developed (and active) trouble makers and his mother labors to feed her family which now includes the returned father figure who spends most of his time drinking and lounging in his bikini underwear. Life is not wholesome, but Cliffy's devotion to his mother holds him together. As Cliffy begins his school year he is seated by a young Jewish lad, Noah Baumgarten, and as the story slowly unwinds we discover the differences and similarities between these two new friends. The spectrum in which each lives covers the racial tension in the neighborhoods as the bonded pair are referred to as Oreos, or more maliciously as Nigger and Jew. And it is this disparity of home life and background that makes each boy envy the status of the other - Cliffy wants to become a Jew and have a caring father and mother like Noah's and Noah longs to be a Soul Brother. Together they explore the limits of their environment of discord as well as the territory of their developing bodies and sexuality. In time their respective families meet (or rather collide) and the boys discover the secrets of each other's family members, with special attention focused on the fathers whose personal problems have shaped each boy's life. Out of this puzzling quagmire of family developments Cliffy and Noah plan an escape from it all, an escape that will allow them to live their young passionate love life without the gloom of their pasts. But can they find that path? That is where Ruff leaves the reader, hoping for a happy ending for these two wonderful kids, but without a map except the pathway to the heart these two unforgettable characters have carved in this story. FINLATER explores same sex attraction in boys as they enter puberty as well as any author who has approached this subject. But Shawn Stewart Ruff writes with such restraint and eloquence that his characters never lose balance on the tight