Book 959: The Dove in the Belly – Jim Grimsley

When I finished re-reading Dream Boy back in May, I did a quick search to see what Jim Grimsley was up to these days and stumbled across this upcoming release. I reached out to the publisher for a copy and crossed my fingers it wasn’t going to be as traumatic or emotionally draining as the others I’ve read.*

The Dove in the Belly is the story of Ronny and Ben. It takes place on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus in the 1970s and that’s the main reason I wanted to read this, Grimsley went to UNC and having it set on the UNC campus intrigued me as I also went to UNC and remember some of the history around the early LGBT organizations and experiences on campus.

I spent most of the novel waiting for the bad part to happen. I held my breath a few times turning the page during certain tense moments, because after reading Dream Boy and forgetting how traumatizing that was and reading My Drowning a few years ago, how could this one end happily?! ESPECIALLY in the 1970s in the south?!

Honestly, I wasn’t sure Grimsley could write a happy ending, but thankfully Ronny and Ben got a happy-for-now ending at the very least. Ben is the big bad football player who somehow falls for Ronny, the slight nerdy journalist who helps him with his homework. There’s definitely a power dynamic at play throughout the novel bordering a bit on the Dom/sub dynamic, but Grimsley doesn’t really go into that. It also could just be part of the hyper-machismo of the football culture.

Ronny knows he’s gay and has strong feelings about it, even if he’s never used the word until his 2nd/3rd year of undergrad. There are some undercurrents and interesting details around his family, but those are for you to read. At a time when Ronny and Ben are on a break, because of a family tragedy and Ben’s inability to emotionally process things, Ronny attends a meeting of the Gay Students Association (or something like that) and before that, he goes through this process that really brought the coming of age and self-acceptance aspects of the story home for me:

Gay. He had to accept the word and the fact. It was his nature, he had to stop denying. Remember the times he’d told Ben he never could be attracted to a guy who was gay, which meant, effeminate, or obvious, or flamboyant; which meant honest, open, brave enough to come out of the closet. He hated the idea of being labeled, he had said; he was more than just a gay person, he had said; he wanted to be attracted to a man for what the man was, he had said. So much crap he had said. The conviction had swum up through his thinking during the awful summer, in the echo of Mrs. Nickelsen’s death, when Ben was god knows where. If he was too afraid for people to know he was gay, then what did that mean about his character? What hope could he have? Doomed to be obsessed with straight boys. Doomed to nothingness. But even that wasn’t fair. Because he had no idea what had happened inside Ben. Because he had no idea what was happening to Ben right now. Silence told him nothing, after all. (256-7)

There are definitely moments of tragedy and sadness in the book with two deaths and quite a few near misses when it comes to brutality, but for the most part, this book is basically like a ray of sunshine in Grimsley’s works (at least the ones I’ve read).

Tim was curious about the title, as was I but not enough to look it up until he said it was a weird phrase. Turns out it’s from Wallace Stevens’s poem The Dove in the Belly and that of course made me think of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys, which pulls its name from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two Birds, which had a bit of poetry in it. I’m not sure why they connected for me other than the beauty of the prose and the tragedy mixed with happiness mixed with history.

Recommendation: Definitely worth the read, it took me a lot longer than expected, but that has more to do with me (hey new puppy Barnaby) than the writing, but it does start a bit slow. Thankfully, the only similarity to Grimsley’s other darker works that I’ve read was the beautiful language he uses to set the place and to have the characters get to know each other. I won’t lie though I spent a lot of the novel waiting for the other shoe to drop and in the end, it never did. This definitely made me want to read the rest of Grimsley’s back catalog even if they’re all dark and gothic like the others. His beautiful prose is well worth the emotional drainage.

*I received a copy of The Dove in the Belly from the publisher in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “Out of the blue, she called.”

Closing Line: “There was Ben stepping out of the car, and Ronny slowly ambled in his direction while the shadows pooled and the owls sang.”  (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from The Dove in the Belly
“The sharp peak of the tall, thin Morehead Bell Tower stood just behind it at the center of neatly pruned shrubbery; there was a story that the Wilsons and the Moreheads hated one another, and the bell tower aimed to put a dunce cap on the dome of the library if you viewed it from South building, the home of the university chancellor at the head of Polk Place. The tale was handed down from student to student, taking on the form of truth in the wake of so much repetition. Could be it really was.” (151)

“Ben kissed him, opened him up, brought their bodies together, drawn down into each other, nothing had changed. Ronny tried not to expect anything at all and found himself soon enough as lost as before in the sensation, Ben gentle for longer than ever, which only made the turn to something fiercer more acute, more like a heartache that pierced them both at the same moment. Suddenly in the double bed they learned economy and hardly needed to move. Pleasure can burn, can sting, can cool, can heat, can do everything at once, and then soothe, and then rush forward, almost there, and almost there, as many times as it can be pressed, until there comes an end. They had that thought again, together and at the same time, that this was the thing they were, not what they were doing but what they were seeing, that what they contained was a big space, open, clean, belonging to no one else. Free.” (204)