Max and Mark? Who Cares?

Much like many other romance stories, I found the protagonists of Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir to be dry and lackluster. During the book I felt like characters like Max and Mark exist only to tell the love story. The story, not the people, is what really matters. To me, the two main characters were not powerful enough to draw me into their ruse of being heroes. While some may think that the depth of the characters conveys the more vigorous lessons behind the story, this is a “certain unproved placebo effect” (31). To me, Max and Mark were just sugar pills; they had no effect on me. As Amanda mentioned in her post, I think that their characters exhibited cowardice and fear. They latched onto their mothers, and, from Ferro’s morbid descriptions of the women’s deaths, didn’t know what to do with after they had gone. If Ferro had wanted the love story of his novel to truly shine through, his heroes should not have been dependent on their aging mothers. They should have been dependent on each other and their partners.

Last semester in GOV310, we analyzed the gay rights movement a lot during our section on constitutional silences. We read an article from a prominent gay politician who was countering the argument that legalizing gay marriage would undermine marriage as an institution. This man argued that gay partnerships are often formed on the basis of friendships or feelings of brotherhood, so that they are made to last. Gay men, he said, were less likely to weaken marriage through divorce or separation like regular couples because they found their marriages on those principles. If Max and Mark couldn’t put all their strength into each other and their partners, than I am not so sure the love story behind all of this is so strong, either. The protagonists’ reliance on their mothers take them back to a child-like state, in my mind. And children can’t have serious, loving relationships. The weakness of the characters turns Ferro’s revolutionary love saga into a regular book than someone could purchase for $5.99 at Tom Thumb. What could have been a great novel is now “lying through the night on the top shelf as if filed away and forgotten” (61). And the problem with that is that books in that position are not typically dusted off and brought back to life. Seeing that The Family of Max Desir went out of print last summer, it seems that Max and Mark have been put up on the shelf for good.