Victor Dwyer says if you loved One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, you'll like Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart
The last few years have seen a surge in the sales of LGBTQ novels, with U.S. author Casey McQuiston leading the charge with bestsellers like 2021's One Last Stop.
The Next Chapter columnist Victor Dwyer, a Toronto-based writer and editor, says that readers who loved One Last Stop may also enjoy the 1960s novel Desert of the Heart, a groundbreaking portrayal of a lesbian romance by the late Canadian writer Jane Rule.
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
"One Last Stop is the story of August, a woman in her early 20s. She's just moved to New York City to go to college. August is kind of part Nancy Drew — she loves to solve mysteries. She's part Encyclopedia Brown; she's part adorable, confused, insecure, slightly nervous, still kind of in the closet.
"She's fled to the big city to get out from under the thumb of her single mother who loves her a lot, but who is really stuck in the past. It has echoes of Armistead Maupin's classic series Tales of the City, and I found myself thinking as well of Dionne Brand's 2005 novel What We All Long For.
"August finds herself moving in with a cast of creative, generous, sex-positive roommates, and across the hall from the strait-laced accountant who on weekends becomes a drag queen named Annie Depressant. Every weekday, August takes the Q train to campus, and one morning she slips and falls on board. To her rescue comes this fetching young fellow passenger named Jane. And before long, August is running into Jane every single time she boards the Q, which at first she finds totally awesome.
"But — because this isn't just a LGBTQ novel, it's also a semi-sci-fi novel — she soon discovers there's this unsettling reason that Jane is always on the Q. And that's because she's been unable to step off — even onto the platform — since 1977, which was about the time Jane herself had escaped the suffocating past of her own by moving to what was then this exciting, liberating post-Stonewall New York.
The Q train becomes this place of romance, but also a place from which Jane and August, two women each kind of stuck in their separate paths, have to escape as a couple to the future.
"Smitten August starts putting her detective skills to the test and tries to figure out what's going on, and the Q becomes this sort of laboratory for figuring out what's happening. This is definitely a bodice-ripper — it becomes kind of a Subway Car Named Desire. And the Q train becomes this kind of place of romance, but also becomes this place from which Jane and August, two women each kind of stuck in their separate paths, have to escape as a couple to the future — if they can."
Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule
"It's slightly unlikely but I will defend my choice, which is Jane Rule's 1964 novel Desert of the Heart. Some people may know it better through its incarnation as the 1985 film Desert Hearts, starring Helen Shaver, but 20 years before that movie, Jane Rule really rocked Canadian literature and LGBTQ literature.
"This is an urban novel for gay people, and it's a great love story. She actually finished writing the book in 1961, published in '64 — it was rejected 22 times before Macmillan took a chance on it. This was still an era of really ruthless heterosexuality in both fiction and real life — on bookshelves, the only lesbian fiction were kind of sleazy pulp novels that also inevitably ended in suicide or insanity or a miraculous conversion to heterosexuality. And of course, society at large was this place where being gay was a sin and a sickness and a fireable offense.
"If Casey McQuiston kind of writes about time travel, Jane Rule was really literally ahead of her time with this story. It's the story of two women — one is 40-year-old Evelyn Hall; when the novel opens, in many ways she is not ahead of her time. She was born in the '20s. She wears gloves and a hat when she goes out. She writes letters where she believes in her tightly-wound heart that every woman should be married to a man — but her own marriage of many years is almost over.
If Casey McQuiston kind of writes about time travel, Jane Rule was really literally ahead of her time with this story.
"Evelyn has just arrived in Reno, Nevada. If she stays in Reno for six weeks, she'll be able to declare herself a resident and obtain what was in those days a quickie divorce from a marriage that's been a complete failure — a failure she suspects but doesn't quite realize has something to do with her deepest self and her deepest longings and needs, and the fact that a conventional marriage didn't satisfy them.
"While she's waiting it out, she meets this free-spirited woman, Ann, a casino worker 15 years her junior and at peace with her own lesbian longings. And so a bit like August unsticking Jane from her captivity in the subway and freeing August from her insecurities and loneliness, Ann has to pry Evelyn out of the self-hatred of the closet, and Evelyn needs to try to show Ann that there can be this intimacy and love that goes beyond Ann's ideas of what a same-sex romance could be.
"When you read Desert of the Heart, in some ways, you think, 'Oh, God, this is so kind of dreary compared to One Last Stop.' But I think it captures the closet of that era so well — the characters in that book almost have to take themselves to that place where maybe we could just magically think we could have love when we're gay.
"We've come a long way. Of course, we're all aware that those changes can be tentative, but have a feeling of a whole new era 50-60 years later."
Victor Dwyer's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
