Longing : a novel /

Despite some not quite unobtrusive solecisms, this is a valuably mundane as well as affecting gay novel. Like so many others, it's a coming- out story, the nameless narrator's account of leaving college to live in San Francisco and adopt one of the predominant models of gay male life-style-- working out every day and regularly cruising bar and bath. The time is the very early 1980s-- hints of the coming AIDS holocaust are dropped throughout-- and the narrator is hunk enough to exploit fully the hedonistic choice he's made. But he's also a romantic, motivated by the longing for love more than the twinges of lust. When he falls in love, he's setting himself up for a worse fall, as one of his gym buddies tells him-- a fall he inevitably winds up taking. It doesn't make him cynical but changes him from romantic to nascent New Ager. He's been a realist (a surprisingly genteel one) in talking about the process, however, so that his story is utterly credible, arguably closer to more gay men's actual experience than several literarily more distinguished coming-out/first-love sagas. RO.

Sentimentalized but generally affecting novel of gay life in San Francisco, pre-AIDS. The narrator (left unnamed) grew up in ""dusty hamlets"" and made his way to college in California, where he majored in anthropology and came out of the closet. As the novel begins in the mid-70's, he's fallen madly in love with Stephen (""He wears red running shorts and lives at the end of the block""), but Stephen, sadly, opts for marriage and the straight life. The narrator is then off to San Francisco's Castro District, where he immerses himself in the gay gym culture, the baths and the sex clubs, seeking ""the fulfillment of yearning."" It comes at last in the form of handsome young Cole; he and the narrator have a passionate love affair--until the narrator finds out that Cole has been sleeping around. The two try for a reconciliation, but by novel's close it has failed to take hold. Slight on plot, but Reed has a keen eye for the ""carnival"" of gay life in San Francisco before AIDS. Unfortunately, though, the book--and Reed's very real talent--are marred by overwriting and cichÉ. Thus, Cole's eyes are ""deep pools of mystery."" And simply going out on Sunday nights becomes: ""We refused the counsel of languor and stubbornly pursued Sunday nights in that frantic, last-minute search for pleasure that earned its pursuers the tag 'desperado.' Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.