The Things Left Out: Kyle Dillon Hertz’s The Lookback Window

So much new fiction seems churned out ready-made for TV serialization, its language reduced to a baseline functionality pointing to a generalized idea of how things look and feel, all the easier to repackage in some new form that similarly fails to deepen the relationship between character and audience. But Kyle Dillon Hertz’s debut novel, The Lookback Window, is an exceptional standout in this crowded landscape, a narrative that grapples with rather than elides the problem of authenticity.

Late in this complex and daring book, Dylan—a young queer man traumatized by a history of sexual abuse, now both wizened and enraged beyond his years—describes railing against peers in his graduate creative writing workshop. He rants about how the other students’ work too often lazily stumbles into cliché when attempting to represent what he ironically refers to as transcendence.

Dylan’s outrage finds its target in the casually descriptive use of the word “neon” in story drafts that feature characters going out dancing, as if the word itself represents something “beautiful and symbolic” without being tasked with anything beyond a vague gesture to a universal mise-en-scène—a beauty that can be implied rather than described in full. The word is a missed opportunity for depth, and perhaps also a moral failing, because, as Dylan says to the reader:

“…beauty was not symbolic. Beauty knee-capped the delusion of existence—the accidental collision of the shortness of your own life and the endurance of the world—with a limited reach but nearly inexhaustible supply. I suspected these people believed that if they could create beauty somebody might love them. If you could not understand the consequences and seriousness of beauty, you should have no control of any world, real or imagined.”

As such, the writer—the one in control of the world that we accept a contract to enter—must foresee the effects of what they’re scribbling into being and what it means to approach authenticity in a particular way. The negligent blurring or hasty conjuring of what might have been a more precise and illuminating detail becomes a directive to strip the artist of their brush.

The same can be true about testimonies of trauma, especially in fiction, where perhaps novelists have done away too cavalierly with what Willa Cather once affectionately dubbed “the things left out.” Some writers seem to believe that merely suggesting rather than more fully explicating a trauma should be enough to elicit a powerful empathy response in the reader.

Cather was saying more there about narrative structure and the complicated relationship between showing and telling; her craft and identity were both the kind that relied heavily on the unspoken. But the truth remains that the advocacy or practice of vagueness in a novel is an affront to the possibilities of the form.

In The Lookback Window, while describing his history of childhood sexual abuse, Dylan explains that he was “a boy so afraid I never screamed,” and the explicit narration in flashback of his experiences of sex trafficking dulls the reader into a similar state of numbness. The relentless horror of what happened to him—described retrospectively by a young adult seeking the possibility of justice and redemption—gradually erodes our capacity for shock but also deliberately limits our ability to imagine Dylan’s psychological reality. In some cases, empathy possibly becomes a bridge too far, which is perhaps why art exists.

The lookback window of the novel’s title refers to the Child Victims Act and its one-year extension of the statute of limitations for cases like Dylan’s, and the ticking clock of the novel is his grappling with the question of whether he will pursue restitution in a civil case. “I believed he was showing me the world at its truest,” he writes about the older boy who sold Dylan’s body to other men for sex when he was a teenager, “full of fire and longing, secrets and locked doors, and for years, despite what happened to me and the threats he made, I lied to keep him safe.”

And the truth behind the lie threatens to destroy him from the inside, fueling self-obliterating behaviors and distancing him from the people he loves—and the people trying to help him—as he wrestles with the possibility of carving out some kind of a future without the weight of his personal history. “When I tried to think about what happened,” he explains, “I needed to get high or get fucked, or let rage and abandonment consume my whole life.”

Hertz writes with a powerful blend of publicly experienced scene and deeply private interiority, using the tools of first-person observation to scaffold complex layers of meaning over otherwise familiar settings and situations. Reflecting on a statistic that one in four men have been sexually assaulted, he writes through his protagonist that “I look around a gay bar and feel the ceiling come down,” the ubiquity of violence against queer people being a truth always lurking behind the celebratory faces crowding those dance floors.

Throughout the book, Hertz expertly presents both the rapturous façade of post-closet gay life and the cracks in its hastily constructed foundation. He fashions his narrator into a perfect lens through which to bear witness to what lesser writers shove off the page with words like “neon,” obscuring the potential of true beauty by affixing it with a secondhand mask.

“Beauty demanded care and received destruction,” Dylan tells us, concluding his screed about stand-in language for true experience. “If neon was beautiful it would have been assaulted and carried out of every bar on the backs of people willing to sacrifice their lives for the chance to touch brilliance. Instead, neon winked lasciviously on a wall, barely capable of crucifying the flies.” And Dylan’s past self is like the neon of those workshop stories: a proxy for something that could only truly emerge through the dogged accumulation of observation and experience.

His therapist urges him to “establish a narrative, ordering the events of my life in such a manner that they would be stored properly in my brain,” believing that Dylan’s repressed memories have scrambled his sense of self. But The Lookback Window ultimately gives him the grace to let the foundation collapse into the dirt and finally see what might emerge from the rubble.

“I hadn’t believed the past ran under the present. I didn’t know that it was a reservoir,” he explains, a metaphor taking shape about the things we try to leave behind that in fact we will carry with us forever, as Dylan realizes finally that he was “sinking with every step.” The novel concludes with an expansive address to readers who might recognize something of themselves in its pages and need, for once, to see an ending that can also be a beginning.

Kyle Dillon Hertz’s The Lookback Window is now available from Simon & Schuster.