esrosedotblog

I just finished reading Mark Merlis first novel, Man About Town.

Merlis is a retired national expert on health care matters with great experience in navigating the shoals of the federal bureaucracy.

He puts this personal experience to good use in this story about a legislative aid, a health care expert, who navigates the choppy waters of non-partisan advice to congresspeople.

At the same time, the aid, is undergoing a lot of stress in his personal life.

A middle aged man, his partner has just left him and he must deal with the cozy non-work environment which he has built for himself. A little closet.

As he adapts to this change in his personal situation, we learn about gay life in the time that this is taking place. The eighties. Which is not that far from gay life today. The bar scene, the pickup scene, the ads, the life.

He has a drinking problem and, it seems, a coming out problem, never having really completed the process. Now alone, it is up to him to find a new and happy life.

There are a lot of themes here deftly balanced. Middle age for some gay men is an early death. We get to see a resuscitation. Oddly, with a young man who likes older gay men. A suspicious trait as it often is a trap for the older man to take on the parenthood of the younger man. In this case, the younger man is black.

We see all of this through the bureaucrat's eyes. His self hatred still needs to expunged. He must and does look at the origins of his superficial bar life before and after the big relationship that left him.

We get a glimpse of the fifties. A time that kids used things like Sear's underwear ads and those little inserts for special bathing trunks as a way to glimpse other men.

I really liked this novel. I saved it because I had read all the others by Merlis and they are sort of grow out of this one although they cover quite different eras (in one case, Greek mythology in modern gay language) and all are fun and instructive. Not always happy but always insightful and enjoyable reading.

Labels: books