CHRISTOPHER

A lethargic Lothario does what he can to bring his cute, depressed neighbor around to a love affair.

Set in the glum, depressing year of 1984 in the tumult of Manhattan, Burnett’s debut begins as a glib chronicle of an older gay man’s attempt to woo a straight man into his arms, but it becomes, almost despite itself, a touching story of unrequited love. The author’s arch, condescending narrator, B.K. Troop, has just been forced out of his apartment of some two decades by his landlord’s surprising mental breakdown. Once ensconced in his new building, B.K. makes the passing acquaintance of Chris Ireland, a slim, good-looking tutor and would-be novelist who has just ended a bitter first marriage to an odiously self-involved actress. Utterly entranced and sensing easy prey, B.K. inserts himself into Chris’s life. The two become friends, and soon Chris is sharing every detail of his manic-depressive life with the very interested B.K. Partly because of his friendship with B.K., Chris begins to change some of his comically self-destructive habits—including a deathly codependent relationship with his ghoul-like psychiatrist mother—and takes on more and more of the trappings of a normal, productive life. The healthier Chris gets, of course, the less likely he is to fall into B.K.’s arms in a lost, drunken, horny stupor, a fact B.K. knows all too well. Almost more impressive than Burnett’s having created such a delectable narrator as B.K.—with all his sub-Wildean posing, faux fallen-aristocrat mannerisms—is her keeping him from running off with the book. Somewhere in the process of this glacially slow and comically inept seduction, B.K. morphs from a predator to a lovelorn mooner, doomed to see Chris spread his wings and fly away to a happier life.

At times both acid-tinged and unbelievably sweet, a hopeless love’s lament.