Originally published in the New York Times, 5/15/24
In Allen Bratton’s debut novel, “Henry Henry,” Shakespeare’s Henriad (the tetralogy of plays that, combined, trace the rise of Henry V) is given a modern queer makeover. In Bratton’s version, which is set in 2014, Prince Hal is now just “Hal Lancaster,” our young gay protagonist who is possessed of “nothing but a subsidiary title, an unignorable sense of his own pre-eminence and a daily terror of this pre-eminence going unnoticed by everyone in the world except his father.” Hal’s father, Henry, is the Duke of Lancaster only because the main line of inheritance ended when Henry’s cousin Richard, the intended heir, died of AIDS. Hal and his siblings have been both maintained and stunted (fiscally, socially and spiritually) by this (fiscal, social and spiritual) inheritance, and as the novel begins, their father’s decision to remarry threatens to upend their static existence.
With this reimagining, Bratton has created a marvelously detailed world of supernumerary aristocrats, as rich, toxic and wild as the best entries in the “Real Housewives” franchise. Even one of his more seemingly moral characters nonchalantly mentions how she disliked a girl in school, and so “at Cannes I pushed her off the deck of a yacht.”
At first, Hal seems like a petulant yet typical member of this world, except that he is sodden with Catholic guilt over his bad behavior, and his very existence. He is aware of his faults — he’s a self-hating popinjay with a prodigious coke habit — yet he’s unable to act differently. This seeming paradox is explained a few chapters in, when it is graphically revealed that Hal is a survivor of ongoing sexual abuse that started in childhood. He bears the pain of both his betrayed child self, wondering why God let this happen to him, and his ashamed adult self, who wonders why he hasn’t spoken out about it.
In Hal, Bratton offers a psychologically acute portrait of the kind of trauma-born narcissists who yo-yo between judging everyone else as beneath them and hating themselves for those very judgments. But a portrait is not a novel, which depends as much on plot and action as it does character and world-building. Bratton has accurately drawn a protagonist stuck still by his pain, and the result is a story that for long stretches also feels stuck itself. Hal reacts to others’ actions, feels guilty, lashes out and gets trashed — a cycle that repeats and repeats. The book tells us that “Hal liked to have fun, he liked not to suffer,” and that when he got punished for misbehaving, “on him, the consequences were charming,” but we are so deep in his mind that his guilt and unhappiness dim any such lighter moments.
Hal is hurting, and he admits that his only shield against his pain is his fiendishness, but he also realizes “how poor a defense his own bitchy irony was.” When he finally does experience a moment of catharsis, it’s borrowed from his cousin’s death from AIDS, and told in an anomalous monologue from an otherwise offstage character, smooshed into a late chapter.
One of Shakespeare’s great skills was creating unreliable characters who profess to be in control of their madness or depravity while simultaneously seeming to be lost in its grips. That ambiguity allowed every member of the audience (or future adapter of his stories) to make their own call on these knotty figures. Bratton positions his protagonist to be one of these Shakespearean enigmas, but by giving Hal a direct and backward-looking explanation for his actions — Hal’s bad because Hal’s traumatized — “Henry Henry” obviates the delicious questions about his behavior. Sure, Hal’s self-aware about his conduct, but he doesn’t seem to have agency over it, and thus lacks that Shakespearean moral complexity. And without that, “Henry Henry” feels well written but inert.