‘Not all ambiguities need to be resolved,’ claims the narrator in the postface of Blackouts, Justin Torres’ latest literary triumph. By this point, the reader has likely been left breathless and disorientated by a fragmented style, the novel’s beauty lying in a collage of loose ends. In a fading institution out in the desert, our narrator tends to his elderly friend Juan. During their last days together, the younger man promises to continue his dying companion’s important project involving a real-life 1941 study entitled Sex Variants: A Study Of Homosexual Patterns. This study began as a work of activism by queer researcher Jan Gay, but an external committee quickly turned it into an attempt to pathologise homosexuality. The names of participants were removed and their faces blurred out.

Blackouts seamlessly blends fact and fiction to mine lost stories. The real-life research and its authors provide a historical framework, but it is the fictional conversations of our two main characters that provide a human face to dark history. An inspiration for Torres was Manuel Puig’s Kiss Of The Spider Woman, a novel (then play and film) which depicted daily conversations between two cellmates. Torres cleverly mirrors that work through the relationship of Juan and the narrator who spend each day swapping anecdotes about gender, class and race.

Torres’ 2011 debut We The Animals is widely celebrated, but this second novel is far more experimental as he plays masterfully with style and form. At one point the men begin telling their stories in the form of screenplays, interrupting each other to suggest music choices. Later, Torres flawlessly inserts a short story that was previously published in The New Yorker while the pages themselves are punctuated by redacted sections of the original Sex Variants study. At first, this blackout poetry appears to be an act of censorship, but by erasing the scientific jargon, Torres tries to recapture humanity and emotion. This determination to rewrite corrupted history encapsulates the spirit of a wonderful novel. 

Justin Torres: Blackouts is published by Granta on Thursday 2 November.