Privates /

A middle-aged gay writer escaping a broken relationship tries to relive his past in this slow-moving fox trot down memory lane from the author of The Ladies of Levittown (1980) and Mr. Jack and the Greenstalks (1970). Fifty-year-old Willy Howards is a novelist of some repute who lives on Long Island with his lover of 27 years, art curator Victor Friedman. The two of them are famous among their friends for the stability and longevity of their relationship--even Willy's sister considers them ""married""--but as the novel opens, in 1980, Victor has decided he wants a separation. Crushed, Willy flies out to San Francisco to visit Sammy Tolan, an old Army love (but not lover) whom he last saw in 1953. The narrative then flashes back to Texas, 1951, where Willy (a sensitive, literary Jewish kid out of Brooklyn and City College) and Sammy (a confident Texan escaping a backward family and a small, dusty town) meet at Fort Hood as fellow cannon fodder for the Korean War, soon discover their ""sisterhood,"" and spend a great deal of self-dramatizing time talking about it, mainly in cloying Tennessee Williams-speak (they call each other ""Blanche"" and ""Stella for star,"" giggle about the kindness of strangers, register in hotel rooms under the name Kowalski, etc.). A tittle of this goes a long way, especially in the absence of all but the thinnest of plot threads--Sammy gets a promotion and saves them both from Korea; Willy wants to make love to Sammy, but Sammy keeps things platonic. The novel simply swims in mistily directionless nostalgia before floating back up to 1980, where Sammy decides he now wants to make a go of things with Willy, but Willy--eyeing his old friend's sizable paunch--demurs and heads back to Long Island. Predictably enough, Victor has had a change of heart, and the two of them are reunited. Horowitz often works right on the intense edge of true sentimentality (as in his moving second novel, A Catch in the Breath, 1969), but this time he steps over the line into self-indulgent mawkishness. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.