A gripping coming of age novel about gay high school wrestlers in suburban New Jersey
You know a novel is first rate when the story is so authentic and tense that the reality seems to resonate. PINS explores the strange boundaries of machismo and homophobia in sports, specifically high school wrestling. Yet this is hardly your typical coming-of-age story of being a gay teenager living in the adolescent closet in suburban America, because numerous harsh and heart-wrenching twists add chaos and nuances that keep the drama from being trite.
Set in middle-class Little Falls, N.J., just outside New York City, PINS centers on the blossoming friendship between Joey and Dink, two Catholic teenagers both on the school varsity wrestling team. Included here are all the crash diets, "nutpulls" and sexual tension that come with this difficult territory.
However, don't expect a sensationalized potboiler about teenage sex - this is not porn. Instead, PINS is more of a story about loners plagued by adolescent malaise, psychological detachment from suburbia, religion and family - and the grisly murder of one of their peers.
The story, which takes place in the mid-1990s, is an American tragedy set in a New Jersey world of PTA where Nirvana-crazed teens play Nintendo and quote Kurt Cobain lyrics, smash windows of gay bars, and Valium-addled housewives pray to patron saints, lurk in shopping malls and drag the kids to confession and Mass on Sundays to somehow make sense of all the madness.
While there are some humorous moments, such as Joey masturbating to Mario Lopez on Saved By The Bell and unsuccessfully trying to buy porno mags in a bookstore, the overall tone of PINS is sad and dark, but completely engrossing. This isn't so much a tale of teenage wrestlers as it is a brooding chronicle of Catholic guilt, faith, family and sexuality in a New Jersey of intolerance.
The characters here are real and loaded with depth, making the action and uncertain ending that much more vivid and ultimately poignant.
PINS is an auspicious debut, sort of a Catcher in the Rye about disillusioned gay jocks. It firmly establishes Jim Provenzano as an important new voice in early 21st-century fiction. - torso Magazine, 2000
Excerpt
All the way back to Proust and Radclyffe Hall, queer youth novels (whether frank or tacit) have told largely the same story: Art-loving, "sissy" lads pine indoors while the girls get to ride horses, play softball, etc., even as their "tomboyish" ways spur equal torment. Of course, these stereotypes wouldn’t exist if they weren’t sometimes true to life.
But not everyone is cut from the same mold, or experiences formative feelings of sexual "difference" in social isolation. Local writer Jim Provenzano’s first novel, PINS, is refreshing for the casual, credible way it paints a less familiar (in fiction, at least) albeit perhaps equally typical gay adolescence: his New Jersey-bred protagonist Joey Nicci is a jock through and through. Transferred from Catholic to public high school when his father’s career prompts a family move, sophomore Joey is cute and affable. But he’s unsure where he fits in clique-wise until making varsity squad on the wrestling team.
Like a lot of teens, Joey has a fair idea which way his desires tilt, but he’s not so confident yet about acting on them, let alone putting a specific preference-identity label on himself. The sometimes-literal sexual frisson in real competition wrestling (which is not at all like the flashy, faked TV kind, Provenzano takes pains to point out) does stoke his private fantasies. That doesn’t mean Joey’s just in it to get his rocks off – he’s serious about athletics, even if his still-closeted feelings make him weigh interactions between teammates in a more complex light.
The author, who pens the "Sports Complex" column in SF’s Bay Area Reporter, brings evident personal knowledge and a crisp, uncluttered prose style to this coming-out saga. Though told third-person, PINS effectively puts us in 15-year-old Joey’s p.o.v., capturing apt details from the musical obsessions du jour (thrash-metal like Tool and Nine Inch Nails) to the homoeroticism and homophobia that coexist in high school athletics.
Joey’s family life, too, is insightfully sketched, as his parents and younger siblings deal variably with relocation and other stresses. PINS works best early on, when such engrossing-if-unremarkable home/school concerns dominate. Midway, the tale takes a sharp turn – one that doles out vicious, drunken violence to the wrestling team’s more obvious "queer." Subsequent soul-searching, "narcing," media and court travails are well-enough handled. But however well-intentioned, these later developments feel a bit forced; the book might have made its necessary points about tolerance and fear just as vividly without resorting to ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama.
Still, PINS is a fresh debut that feels psychologically on target even when its plot mechanics grow schematic. A fast read, it’s accessible stuff for teens as well as adults–though, given some explicit sexual content in the late going, don’t expect PINS to surface on sub-college curricula anytime soon. - review in East Bay Express
Professional Reviews
Sharp PINS - Douglas A. Mendini, The New York Blade
What starts off as yet another "coming-of-age" tale of gay youth in suburbia takes a dramatic turn and careens into a full-fledged miracle of writing. PINS seduces the reader into thinking that sex is the only thing on its mind. By the time Provenzano is through with his story, however, some universal truths have been examined and harshly displayed.
Joey is an Italian Catholic 15-year-old who has moved with his parents from the mean streets of Newark to the suburbs of New Jersey. In an effort to fit in with the rest of the world, Joey joins the high school varsity wrestling team, where he finds a new group of friends. One friend, Dink, especially interests Joey. Another member of the squad, Anthony, reveals to Joey that he is gay, but Anthony’s whining nature is off-putting to Joey.
Just as Joey and Dink fall into each other’s arms, Provenzano’s plot switches gears. Violence and murder erupt. Lives are torn apart. The relative safety of suburbia is questioned. Family, religion and God are all put to the test. Guilt weighs heavily on Joey’s wrestling shoulders, something he can’t shrug off. Joey’s descent from "good boy" to "troubled youth" is astutely realized in Provenzano’s writing.
Finally the author takes readers on the road to redemption. Joey and Dink’s relationship might never be the same, but that could also be said of the reader who has grown to know and care about some very realistic characters drawn mercifully without halos or happy endings.
San Francisco Chronicle
"PINS manages to break new ground by exploring the clannish, conflicted homoeroticism of wrestling culture. Provenzano knows this territory well, and clearly loves their obsessive, sweaty world."
The Advocate
PINS stands for 'Person In Need of Supervision.' It's also jock talk, a catchphrase of high school wrestling, the team sport that has Provenzano's teenage boys watching their weight like fashion models. By the end of the book, "pins" means, more grimly, the pins through a young trauma victim's neck, holding it straight.
Holding adolescent bodies together is one of the subtler motifs that play across Provenzano's coming-of-age drama.
Wrestling's the ultimate gay sport. But queer love is complicated, especially for 15-year-old jocks. Not until Joey and Dink's involvement in the beating death of the wrestling team's designated "faggot" can the two boys touch each other in a way that highlights love rather than competition.
Provenzano has a swift and flexible style that cuts against sentiment and reveals, in moments of grace, something like true feeling. He's also funny. He has an ear for teenage banter, and he's tartly lyrical about Jersey towns, Italian families and homemade mix tapes with titles like GRAPPLE and AURGH. Most urgent, he shows how gay bashing is still an outlet for kids who grew up in the so-called gay '90s.
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