Rhinestone Country - Darwin Potter

Ladymol's Review:

Many of the things I wrote about Blood Moon are true of this book, too.

It’s full of dreadfully inconsistent characterisation to suit the plot. In one example, the “hero” gives up all men for the sake of one (who he’s hardly had the time of day for before), and your alarm bells just start ringing. Sure enough, the new love of his life is killed. It’s just a manipulative plot device, which angers you toward the author.

This is not a particularly pleasant book. Whereas I was happy that Blood Moon was badly written, but still quite readable for a holiday, this is not. It’s set in the deep south of America and is incredibly racist, which does not sit easy with modern day readers. I don’t like the “n” word, nor do I like black men being described as bucks, which they are throughout the early part of this book. It’s not the characters saying it (Darwin Potter never develops his characters enough to have their own voice), it’s him, in his authorial role concurring with this that I find unpleasant.

Another major flaw in this novel, which he irons out somewhat in Blood Moon, is that he is convinced that he’s writing a proper novel, and that proper novels need female characters. The female lead in this book becomes the wife to the main character, Pete Riddle, as a cover for his homosexuality, which would not be accepted in the country and western music scene in which the book is set. She is incredibly stupid and dull, yet her story takes up a good third of the novel, interwoven with the gay story of her husband.  Her story is incredibly ponderous; she’s unbelievably naïve, and I found myself skipping through her pages to get back to the more interesting storyline.

The preface of the novel is an event in the modern day that the rest of the book works up to in flashback, telling the story of all these characters to show how they lead up to the catastrophic events in the preface.  It had the desired effect, which was to make me read to the end (something I was doubtful of doing at times). When I got to the resolution of this event, I wondered why I bothered.  It’s all so silly that it becomes meaningless farce. It’s as if Darwin Potter grew up watching bad American soaps, where any silly plot device is used to boost the ratings of flagging shows: alien abduction; evil twins you’ve never heard of before; long dream sequences passed off as real life.

However, none of this is as worrying as my main objection to this book. Let me state here and now, nothing in a book offends me if it’s well written.  I admit I bought this book because it explored the theme of incest.  I’m an adult; I happen to believe that you can keep fantasy separate from reality and explore in fiction things you don’t continence in real life. However, the key words for me are well written. This book is not and his handling of the incestuous affair of Pete Riddle and his son Buster is appallingly exploitative. Darwin Potter can’t write children. He just states that so and so character is such and such age, then proceeds to write them as any of his other, adult characters. And therein lies the exploitation.

Buster is five when he starts to seduce his father (I’m not joking). Pete, the father, is presented as totally innocent of his son’s wiles, not getting that letting him handle his erection in the bath is probably not a good idea. By the time he’s eight, Buster is shown putting a mini bar into his room to entice his father in for sex. He speaks like all the other gay studs in the book: big boy, I want you to ram that …. (bad porn dialogue follows).  It’s all so exploitative and unreal because none of the real issues of incest are explored or discussed. Even in an avowed porn novel, The Velvet Web, the seduction of a young stable boy is handled realistically, and it does excite, it is erotic.  Buster’s entire story is so over-the-top that he becomes nothing more than a name on a page as you read.

I made a list of all the male and female characters in this book and tried to join them up showing who’d slept with whom. I ran out of ink. Pete Riddle sleeps with everyone, everyone he sleeps with sleeps with the others, four brothers sleep with him separately, together, with each other, with everyone else. It’s quite exhausting and as they are all basically the same, I wouldn’t bother to try and work out who is who. After all, everyone Pete is with is always the love of his life and he’s going for forsake all others…. Blah.

The book desperately needs editing. Someone needs to make up their mind whether it’s a history of Country and Western music or whether it’s a gay porn novel, because it sits very uneasily between the two. I really can’t believe that anyone who wants to read this extreme level of graphic gay sex is really interested in chapter after chapter about a Dolly Parton-look-alike woman and her dull history.

As with Blood Moon, not for me, and I wouldn’t even say this would make good holiday reading; it’s too unpleasant for that.

Cerisaye's Review:

If you’ve read one Darwin porter novel it looks like you’ve read ‘em all.  That’s the impression I have after trying two of them (see Blood Moon).

This time Porter sets his sordid, and supposedly sexy, tale in the world of the country & western singer, covering a period from 1940s to the 80s.  Again the convoluted plot is overblown, heavy on the melodrama.  I’d guess a real fan of the music and its history could put names to the novel’s fictitious creations.  Lead female character Rosacoke Carson clearly owes something to Dolly Parton.  The early part of the book takes place in North Carolina’s Appalachia, and certainly gives a taste of how hard life was for its people, and the way music was an escape from grinding poverty.

I don’t know how Porter gets away with racist caricatures like Sultan, the black man who initiates Pete Riddle, the good lookin’ country boy who finds fame and fortune as a singer.  Pete likes to think he’s straight. So all he needs is the right woman to keep him satisfied.  He’s got a prodigious appetite, however, and no one woman or man could ever be enough.  Pete’s mood alternates between delirious pleasure and deep shame.  He marries Rosacoke, eventually, while servicing a harem of male lovers. 

It’s a bit like one of those heavy-on-the-angst country ballads. You know the sort.  A dirt poor orphan, raped by her guardian, appearing Cinderella-like in borrowed rags to be swept off her feet by her prince, then wrongfully imprisoned…and yet, through it all she stands by her man.

The book is full of sex.  It’s big on anatomical description, whiffs & sniffs, and for my taste rather lacking eroticism and sensuality.  Repetitive too, and, though graphic, actually pretty dull.  Occasionally risible- way too many rosebuds.  Ew.

There’s an Adams family of strapping lads you’d think wandered in from a porn movie, a stable of teenage boys and a stud daddy, available with group discount.

The dialogue too often evoked cheesy porn.

Porter doesn’t believe in restraint.  We get rape, incest, under-age sex, adultery, castration, voyeurism, water sports…and on, and on relentlessly.

Just like Buck in Blood Moon, Pete’s instantly in love with anyone he beds, male or female.  Pete’s a manly man, a natural top.  Other men want to be his ‘wife’, even when he’s married to Rosacoke.  And Pete finds saying no very hard.  His father/son relationship with Buster is unconventional. I think it’s meant to titillate.  I found it grotesque and rather disturbing.  There’s another son, some vicious sibling rivalry and a bit of attention-seeking behaviour.

It’s all pretty predictable.  When it departs from that, completely ludicrous.

The book has racism, sexism, homophobia, rural deprivation (Sultan’s so poor his house has a blanket for a door), and a sex change.  To name a few.

After a while the story jumps through years as if he’s had enough and wants to wind it up, except there's loose ends to knot together.  Pete learns nothing from start to finish, though I guess he hones his technique.  Rosacoke is more punchbag than character.

Trashy undoubtedly, but Porter has a brash way with words that keeps you reading, often open-mouthed and disbelieving.  There’s definitely a readership for Porter’s books.  I wouldn’t say I won’t buy another.

Publisher: Georgia Literary Association ISBN: 0966803035

Buy From Amazon UK here:  Rhinestone Country

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