American Studies

Reeve is a man who has come to believe his life has collapsed. His professional prospects have stalled, his face is badly injured after a hustler attacked him, and his landlord wants him out because the noise of that night disturbed the building. Confined to a hospital bed, he turns over what to do next, but his thoughts keep drifting back to Tom Slater, the respected American literary scholar who once flirted with communism and later took his own life during the McCarthy era. Slater was Reeve's colleague and mentor, and his downfall weighs on Reeve as heavily as his own.

Reeve is also distracted by the silent young man in the next bed, whose presence stirs a desire Reeve had promised himself he would stop feeling: a longing for straight men, with all the danger that comes with it. Reeve, who always has a pointed remark or a cutting observation ready, uses his narration to survey gay life across the twentieth century. He reconstructs Slater's troubled world, a character inspired by the critic F. O. Matthiessen, and looks back on his own carefree early years and his frank, appetite-driven later ones.

The novel moves between darkly comic commentary and richly ornate prose as it follows themes of longing, betrayal and recovery.