LAST NIGHT

The frame for Out magazine editor Lemon’s debut novel is this: To while away his last hours on Earth in 1987, gay American John Webster, supposedly awaiting execution in his cell in a Havana prison, writes an endless farewell letter to his teenage Cuban lover, Eduardo, a boxer who killed a thief wanting John’s sneakers, but whose murder charge was mysteriously shifted to John. His memory bottomless, John recalls their first meeting in New York, when both attended an embassy party, and their passionate involvement before Eduardo had to return to Cuba with his mother, a member of Castro’s government. John also remembers their next meeting, after he came to Cuba as part of a labor brigade to cut sugar cane, and left the brigade to seek out his lover in Havana—a joyous reunion overshadowed by the assault on a Havana street and subsequent flight to a family friend’s house in rural Cuba. John then recounts in mind-numbing detail his incarceration and interrogation and Eduardo’s trial and what followed, with the acrid scent of homophobia always in the air.

Occasional high-carat insights here into the tricky nexus of passion and power, surrounded by massive quantities of a highly toxic sludge of rumination and detail.