The Man Who Fell in Love With The Moon - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon was very well received when it was published in 1991. The Washington Post called it "amazing" and "dazzlingly accomplished" and The Oregonian said the novel "boldly creates a new voice from the Old West." The New York Times was equally effusive: "The miracle of the novel is that it obliges us to rethink our whole idea of narration and history and myth." The Los Angeles Times found it "brave, original, ribald, funny, heart-rending" and concluded that the book is "as bright as it is dark, full of fictional and philosophical pleasures, a quirky, unsettling look at American history and a vision quest in the grand old tradition." The book's extensive cast of quirky characters was singled out by several reviewers. The Washington Post said the characters were "winningly rebellious...brimming with life", while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said "Spanbauer has populated his pages with characters so colorfully drawn they practically pop off the page and start dancing, egged on by mass consumption of whiskey, locoweed and opium stardust." Reviewers compared Spanbauer to Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Gabriel García Márquez, Garrison Keillor, Thomas Berger, Walt Whitman, William H. Gass, Molly Gloss, and Russell Hoban.

The novel received some critical comments as well. The Oregonian's reviewer thought the characters were too "extreme," felt that the narrative took too long to get going, and concluded that Shed's method of communicating in sentence fragments (often missing a verb or subject) difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, while these elements were "irritating", the reviewer concluded: "he exasperation is worth it: There is something triumphant about a novelist who risks this much and manages to find his way home." The same reviewer also found that some passages might make some readers queasy: "Spanbauer's book, his second novel, is not for the squeamish (or Mormons without a sense of humor). The descriptions of love-making and violence done to the flesh are pretty graphic. Shed is a clear-eyed, unflinching observer, after all; and if someone is going to have her legs amputated, Shed is going to report the dismembering in detail. That makes sense in terms of the character, but it can be heavy going for the sensitive." The Los Angeles Times' critic noticed a resemblance between Spanbauer's novel and other novels from several years earlier which attempted to shock with sex and violence, and wondered whether the novel was "irresponsible" in the age of AIDS.

Despite the generally excellent reviews, by 1999 the Chicago Tribune had called the novel "unjustly obscure". The Los Angeles Times felt the book fell short of "cult" status because it came 20 years too late to be part of the free love and gay liberation movements.

The book's status, and Spanbauer's reputation has an author, have both risen rapidly in the last 10 years. One reviewer noted that "Spanbauer made his mark" as an author with the novel. Robert Walter, director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, quoted a portion of the novel as some of the best American writing in 1993. By 2001, the novel had reached "cult" status. One journalist called the work "an acknowledged minor classic".

The book made two "best of" lists since it was published. In 1999, the Boston Phoenix announced it was the 88th best LGBTQ novel of the 20th century. An organizer for the United Kingdom's Big Gay Read, a follow-up to The Big Read, noted that The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon was the one book that should be added to the first-cut list.