This novel is a masterpiece, a magnus opus, not only for its length but because of its stature as a magnificent literary work. Delany is one of our most famous and prolific contemporary American writers who also happens to be black and gay. Among his 47 works, the most famous are Nova (1968), Dhalgren (1975), Return to Nevèrÿon(1979-87), The Mad Man (1995), and Dark Reflections (2007).
Written between 2004 and 2011, this is a life-long saga that can be compared to earliest classics like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Instead of wide-ranging travel adventures, this portrays a life-long loving relationship between a young white boy and a slightly older black or mixed-race boy.
They meet in a T-room on the day Eric, the white boy, arrives with his black stepfather to his mother’s small community on the Georgia coast. In the T-room he meets Morgan (whom everyone calls “Shit”) and his father “Dynamite,” and almost immediately they create the beginning of a relationship that lasts their entire lives.
The saga here is this relationship and their mutual adventures in and around a black gay utopia called “The Dump,” created and financed by a wealthy black gay man. First they are garbage men, then they manage (and enjoy) a gay porn theater, and finally the two men (after Dynamite’s death) retire to an off-shore island dominated (nicely) by lesbians.
The best review of Valley is Steven Shaviro’s which proclaims “It is the best English-language novel that I know of, of the 21st century so far.” The up-and-coming Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Junot Díaz writes, “A deeply affecting chronicle of a lifelong partnership … by turns generous, unsparing and bursting with life (and sex) in all its difficult, rousing, prismatic splendor. A truly staggering achievement …”
The title is an homage to Italo Calvino’s 1947 novel The Path to the Nest of Spiders, which, in that coming-of-age novel during World War II in Italy, the boy has a secret hideout for protection from the Fascists. Yet Delaney’s book has no nest of spiders and no hide-outs; instead a loving and free relationship extends to a large circle of friends, family, and neighbors.
The boys meet in 2007, and their relationship extends to at least 2077 when Shit dies, close to the age of 90. With little sense of science fiction, the book simply depicts down home in a small George coastal community with minor hints of future technologies.
By the end we have multiple partner marriages and young people of both sexes often uncovering their tops and genitals. A side theme is Eric’s obsession with a difficult book of philosophy, Spinoza’s Ethica, which he reads over and over again throughout the novel.
Every library serious about American literature and specializing in LGBT literature must have it.
Reviewer: James Doig Anderson, Professor Emeritus Library and Information Science, Rutgers University