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A Novel
by Seán Hewitt
Book Reviewed by:A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Justin Torres in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.
Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other's lives.
James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village's leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke's bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.
Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.
Excerpt
Open, Heaven
Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous, and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly, turning liquid, so one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind, is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow- encrusted garden. And then the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms again in reverse. The faces smile at me, back there, at the far end of the reel; they are younger, more innocent, lighter. If, now that I am in my adulthood, time seems like a silted riverbed I cannot wade through, I find, more often than before, that I can spin it backwards, can turn it into a flow of waters – warmer, sweeter, washing the years away, carrying me with them.
And if one day, perhaps, sitting at my desk, puzzling over a photograph or some snatch of memory, I start to float down that river, I might go ...
Open, Heaven, the debut novel from Irish poet Seán Hewitt, opens with recent divorcé James returning to his hometown in northern England and contending with the intense memories his homecoming evokes. But it's not his marriage that he's thinking about—his ex-husband, who is never named, doesn't occupy much space in James's mind—it's an intense infatuation he had with another boy in his youth. Though it has shades of cult classic queer coming-of-age novels, Open, Heaven is a far more interior work. There are certain background plot elements, but the majority of the book focuses solely on James's feelings about Luke. Consequently, it's a rather slow-paced, and almost overly archetypal in its construction (the characters and situations at times feel more like abstractions than individuals), which could be a drawback in comparison to some novels with stronger plotting. For the right reader who appreciates quieter emotional devastation, however, it's a beautiful gem...continued
Full Review
(606 words)
(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
Anne Enright, author of The Wren, the Wren
Hewitt writes with such tenderness and grace; in Open, Heaven, beauty, longing and the natural world form a single chord that strikes the heart of the reader with love's impossibility. The heightened, poetic state of adolescence is perfectly captured here. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Seán Hewitt's Open, Heaven blisses with the bright verdure of youth—blackbirds and blossoming hedges, wet hands held tight under buttery starlight. But Open, Heaven also courses with youth's great agony, the cruelty that learning to love should be inexorably followed by learning to grieve its undoing. Hewitt's is a searching novel orbiting pleasure, loss, and the ecstatic release of both; which is to say it's a novel about time. Which is to say it's a novel about us. Patrick Gale, author of A Place Called Winter
Seán Hewitt's Open, Heaven is a striking debut novel from a richly gifted poet and memoirist: an intensely conjured portrayal of the hopeless, all-consuming love of one lonely teenager for another and how it marks him for life. As in Hewitt's poetry, the beauties of nature erupt throughout, seeming to express the things the two boys cannot voice and the cumulative effect is as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong.
Ireland has an undeniably rich literary history across a wide range of fiction, drama, and poetry—this abundant legacy includes a number of noteworthy pieces of queer fiction and memoir. One of the latest entries into this catalog is poet Seán Hewitt's debut novel Open, Heaven, a gay coming-of-age story that centers on the relationship between two teenage boys.
When discussing queer Irish literature, a natural enough place to start is with Oscar Wilde, who published a number of works in the late nineteenth century. In his only complete novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the titular character sells his soul in order to retain eternal youth and beauty—his portrait, meanwhile, ages and reflects Gray's sins ...
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