The cosmology of Bing /

Middle-aged astronomy professor Bing Owens has had it hard. Assuming the singer's popularity would proliferate generations of namesakes, his mother named him after Bing Crosby. His wife, a brilliant teacher and promising poet, suffered a stroke at 32 that wiped out her intellect. And that after Bing had suppressed his homosexuality to marry her. No wonder he drinks too much, and embarrassed colleagues have had his teaching schedule reduced. And no wonder he is infatuated with Nick, a smart sophomore attending the only course he now teaches. As for Nick, he innocently enjoys Bing's friendliness but is more concerned with his roommate, art student Takashi, who is gay but "masculine as they c[o]me" and, like Nick, a West Texan. Other characters play important parts during the academic year, but aging, desperate Bing and the two young men, whose nonsexual relationship grows deeper, predominate. Cullin dexterously blends coming to terms at midlife, coming out, and coming to adult understanding and, entirely credibly, avoids unhappy endings in a novel as satisfying as it is limpidly written. --Ray Olson

In his latest outing, Cullin (Branches) imagines the anxiety- and paranoia-ridden inner life of alcoholic social pariah Dr. Bing Owen, an aging, sexually repressed astronomy professor at Moss University, a sanctimonious private island of academia in Houston, Tex. Also examined is the raw youth of sophomore Nick Sulpy, avid reader of Walt Whitman and scientific journals, and the object of Bing's clumsyÄand creepyÄaffections. Shunned by faculty peers because of his erratic behavior, Bing has been reduced to teaching an undergraduate lecture class. By night he hangs out in a piano bar, haunted by the distant memory of Marc, his sole male lover; by day he returns home to a loveless relationship with his wife, Susan, whose career as a poet was cut short by a cerebral aneurysm. Taking an immediate interest in Nick, Bing offers to give him special, private lessons in the seclusion of his home; unsuspecting at his mentor's obsession, Nick allows him to importune on his goodwill. A parallel subplot concerns Nick and his gay roommate, Takashi; the development of their friendship soon emerges as the most endearing and emotionally resonant aspect of the novel. Completing a sexually frustrated student m‚nage … trois is thoroughly annoying coed Himiko, who flirts relentlessly with both boys. The three belong to a secret organization on campus called the Pi Crusters, whose m.o. consists of assaulting imagined enemies (ranging from religious zealots to a Nobel laureate) with pies, and it's not hard to guess where all of this is going. Slipping deeper into illness, resentment and desperation, Bing is forced to confront his demons. Despite a rather gratuitous happy ending, fans of Michael Chabon's early work might enjoy this earnest but erratic satire on desire, human frailty and hope of redemption. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Gay longings in academia. Eschewing the unsuccessful novel-in-verse format of Branches (2000), Cullin proceeds here by assigning chapters to seven principal characters (though one of them does write poetry). The story centers on Bing Owen, a professor of astronomy at Moss College in Houston, Texas. He has a book to his credit and a disaffected, childless wife given to heavy doses of Jesus. Bing and Susan have divided the house into his and her rooms and have not slept together for a very long time. She has had an aneurysm; he has bloody semen from a prostate as big as a baseball. Meanwhile, the prof is losing students from his undergrad class, Origins of the Universe, and his second course was canceled because of his drinking and paranoid late-night phone calls hectoring a female colleague. He’s now “a runty man of 58, who could pass for 68,” with a W.C. Fieldsian pale, round face, a gin-blossom nose, and squinty eyes. In his teens, Bing had a few homosexual affairs but abandoned that life to marry Susan. At 36, he fell in love with 24-year-old Marc, who returned his affection but then was struck by a car and killed. Now Bing is obsessed by his straight student Nick and devises various ruses to get much, much closer, offering the young man a solo course in vacuum decay, Thanksgiving dinner, and extended companionship. Anyone familiar with Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (perhaps the first American novel to broach this theme) knows that nothing good will come to Bing when he makes his moves. The best passages here, about astrophysics, come from research. The more emotional material isn’t as compelling.