Ponyboy: A Novel

by Eliot Duncan

Overview

Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction

An evocative debut novel of trans-masculinity, addiction, and the pain and joy of becoming.

Ponyboy unravels in his Paris apartment. Cut to the bar. Cut to the back room. Ponyboy is strung out and struggling. He is falling into the widening chasm between who he is—trans, electrically so—and the blank canvas his girlfriend, Baby, wants him to be.

Cut to Berlin. Ponyboy sinks deeper into drugs and falls for Gabriel, all the while pursued by a photographer hungry for the next hot thing. As his relationships crumble, he overdoses.

Cut to open sky. In a rehab back home in Iowa, Ponyboy is his mother’s son. In precise, atmospheric prose, Eliot Duncan’s debut novel lays bare the innate splendor, joy, and ache of becoming one’s self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324051220
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/13/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	145,377
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eliot Duncan is a United States–born writer and artist. He is the cofounder of the international queer collective Slanted House and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

04/24/2023

Duncan’s triumphant and visceral debut follows a trans-masculine narrator wrestling with gender identity and drug use. Ponyboy, an American living in Paris, takes refuge in the consoling presence of Toni, a trans-woman childhood friend, while his girlfriend, Baby, is out of town. He also drinks heavily and uses cocaine, ketamine, molly, and whatever else he can get his hands on, yearning to be seen as a man (Baby would prefer him as a butch woman). A love triangle develops upon Baby’s return, after she takes an interest in a man who assaulted Ponyboy. As Ponyboy slides deeper into addiction, he becomes alienated from the friends who are trying to help him. The swirling narrative eventually finds Ponyboy back home in the Midwest for rehab, then with family in Vienna, and back in Paris, where he summons the courage to be himself. Duncan’s writing can be indulgent—“Only a poet’s voice will do. This is The Angel Natalie’s. Coming here, wings long and true”—but he makes up for it with sinewy descriptions of Ponyboy’s transition (“My movements are welding into a smoother, masculine strut”) and by channeling Ponyboy’s ache to transform (“I wanna make loud the parts they strangle,” he writes in an email to real-life trans activist author Paul Preciado). Though a bit messy at times, this rings true. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] gutting and glittery three-act coming of age story…The final act takes Ponyboy to rehab, where he unravels his identity, addiction, and recovery — leading his splintered parts to become all that much more himself."

Nylon - Sophie June

"Ponyboy reads like one of those unforgettable nights in your twenties. Duncan captures the optimism that accompanies the allure of Paris, the high of substances, and the sense that anything can happen when the sun falls. Read this book to remember that, no matter how bad the hangover will be, the best is yet to come."

Elias Rodriques

"[Duncan’s] Ponyboy grows increasingly empathetic, while his sometimes melancholy story, like his habit, in the end proves to be addictive. A first novelist to watch very closely."

Booklist (starred review) - Michael Cart

"[Ponyboy] moves breathlessly through space and time…Through a deft command of language, Duncan is able to create a uniquely trans story that fights for the right to be seen."

Dazed - Sam Moore

"Eliot Duncan's melancholic transboy swagger sparkles in this classic story of a dissolute bookish Midwesterner who crashes through Europe, falling in and out of love and stargazing from the gutter. An astonishing first novel."

Andrea Lawlor

"A vivid portrayal of the lure of self-abandonment. Eliot Duncan shows us what is found in pursuit of it—and what is left in its wake."

Hil Malatino

"Ponyboy is a novel about self-immolation and rising from your own ashes with a spent match between your teeth. It’s also one of the best books I’ve read about expat dirtbaggery, and it ferociously portrays the velvety allure of oblivion and the terror, eroticism, and bright urgency of coming home to yourself."

Rebecca Rukeyser

2023-04-12
A troubled protagonist deals with addiction and his own becoming in this expressive bildungsroman.

This novel in four parts begins in a Paris bathroom, where the titular protagonist is getting a haircut from his best friend and flinching at the sight of his own breasts. Ponyboy and Toni “grew up and over and out of Iowa, together,” discovering their true genders alongside each other. With Toni, Ponyboy feels like himself—or at least something close to the self he longs to be. But to his girlfriend, Baby—a lesbian—his masculinity is a problem that they may not be able to resolve. Everyone involved in this ménage drinks a lot of alcohol and snorts a lot of coke, and for Ponyboy, substance abuse is a conscious attempt to escape the difficulty of being himself. His use reaches a crisis point in Berlin—where the second part of the book is set—which sends him into recovery and back to his family. The narrative is interspersed with scenes from his Midwestern youth and oddments like a letter to Sigmund Freud’s patient Dora and imagined conversations with Kathy Acker. During the first parts of the novel, Duncan deploys an arduously metaphorical style that veers from the sublime to the cartoonish. “I lose my body exceptionally” is a gorgeously economical way to describe the way Ponyboy feels liberated from his physical reality while wasted. On the other hand, “My cock-intelligence smolders in my furrowed brow” is a bit hard to take. “Back arched aching in solar want. My teeth pull on the meat of an olive.” This is an excerpt from a text sent to Baby. A very long text. An unsent email message to writer and philosopher Paul Preciado is similarly overwrought. But, as Ponyboy moves toward and through rehab, Duncan chooses a plain style that allows his protagonist to emerge as real and true—and alive.

Technically ambitious, often trying, and ultimately rewarding.

Kirkus Reviews