I enjoyed this fascinating short novel. ( )

So many interesting new books come out every week, and so many others that are older are recommended by friends that I rarely just randomly snatch something off of my dangerously over stuffed bookshelves. This weekend though I was running out the door to meet a friend and realized that I was so close to the end of the book I was reading. There was no way my current read would sustain me through my trip, especially with the Covid F train having been switched to local service so express tracks could be repaired. (Seriously, it should not take me nearly as long to get to Tribeca as it takes me to get to Pennsylvania. Can I get an amen!?) So I reached up and grabbed the book that looked lightest (weight not subject matter) and ran out the door. That book was American Studies. Obviously I went into this read with no expectations aside from that it would be easy to carry. Most of my books were picked up at library book sales or in used book stores and just looked vaguely interesting in the moment. Well I got this one right! This is one of the best written books I have had the pleasure of reading, and I read a lot of well-written books. The story itself is quiet, intellectually compelling, historically resonant, and very interior. It is both tragic and funny (the story is never funny, but the telling often is.)

Stories about educated, white, semi-self-loathing gay white men have apparently fallen from favor. I casually mentioned to a 30ish year old colleague (back when one had impromptu happy hours) that I have always had a thing for the move "Boys in the Band" which is campy and tragic and wonderful and that I was sad to hear Ryan Murphy was remaking it because I despise everything Ryan Murphy touches. I am used to having people jump all over my Ryan Murphy criticisms and I expected that, but she instead went off on the dated stereotypes and the ways in which it made it appear as if all homosexuals where white, well off and educated and felt like aliens roaming the earth, miserable in their skins and bitchy. Well then. I was there, as a cis het woman, but one whose best friend was an educated financially secure gay white man (this was in 1989 where one of the dual storylines is set), and those stereotypes, that misery, the need to playact a great deal of the time, that really happened. As Merlis puts it, the gay men of his generation all wanted to be Noel Coward. And maybe it was different for educated financially comfortable white men than for gay men of other caste and class and educational level. I am white and educated and reasonably financially secure and so were most of the people I knew. But the concerns and pains of the men in this book (as in Boys in the Band), felt very real to me. Very. Merlis really captured his moments with his dual timelines in the McCarthy era, and in 1989 when people's fears and misinformation about AIDS created new wedges and levels of prejudice and reinforced that aliens and earthlings divide between gay men and their larger community. It does not have to, and really cannot, tell the story of all gay men at those points in time, but it tells the story of many men, that I know.

The story itself is fascinating. briefly, the main character is in the hospital after being beaten and robbed by a trick he picked up in a bar. When his friend brings him a book to read written by a person who had been his mentor in the 1950's it sends him down a rabbit hole of memory,, and the story bounces between the 1989 hospital room and the ivied halls of an elite university 30+ years earlier. The characters are brilliant and sad and superficial and loving and all have seen fun and excitement but have not ever seen themselves as people who had the option of settling down, of forming deep human connections, of distinguishing themselves, though it is clear those things look appealing to them.

I am doing a terrible job of selling this, but I cannot recommend it more highly. I mentioned before the sexual superficiality of all of the men is here - the adoration of male beauty, its fetishization is always center stage, or waiting to come on set peering around the curtain. I will leave you with one passage regarding the same so you can get a feel for the tone and the writing (describing his hospital roommate, a handsome young laborer who never speaks to him and who watches cartoons all day):

"I cannot endow him with an interior life -- as if a soul were mine to confer. The very surface of him is so complex and resonant, eyes, mouth, shoulders, each like a well-formed thought, thighs like a dissertation, the witty dialectic of his buttocks and the simple ego sum of his cock: spinning all this forth instant after instant, how could he have time left over for an idea or a motive beyond just being?" ( )

I picked this up on a general recommendation from a friend of mine. Merlis' book is a powerful story of growing up and growing old. Told through the eyes of a gay man in his 60s, we're treated to a fascinating look at what being gay was like in the 30s onward. Merlis' writing is brilliant, the story is fascinating and less depressing than I expected. Our narrator is Reeve, who remembers his past while laid up in the hospital after being beaten up. The story is at times depressing, but also uplifting, especially near the end. Merlis' words are beautiful, breathtaking and quite brilliant. Highly recommended. ( )