THOSE AROUND HIM

An aging gay man is caught between love and death in Shapiro’s first novel.

Two years ago, in 2019, Andrew moved from Paris to Florida to be near his elderly, ailing father, Charles. His sister, the thrice-divorced Sheila, also lives in the area, and the two share the responsibilities of looking after the old man now that their mother has died. Andrew isn’t exactly content to be there, as he’s increasingly aware of his own middle age, at 56, and the fact that moving from the City of Light to “a small town in a refurbished swampland in Florida, where he’d only made obligatory annual family visits, hardly fell in the natural order of things.” Then he meets a much younger man on the beach whose beauty and sense of hopefulness suddenly make Andrew feel young again. Twenty-three-year-old Ex—short for Alexander—is at first merely a source of lustful fascination for Andrew; then the two begin to connect on unexpected levels. As Charles’ condition worsens and hurricane season bears down on the Florida coast, Andrew learns that Ex may be a bit more complicated—and difficult—than he initially realized. Shapiro’s prose is lucid and philosophical, often zeroing in on Andrew’s anxieties and dark humor, as in this passage, in which Andrew analyzes his fear of his father’s moving in with him: “This ‘coming full circle’ or ‘closing the loop’ thing—the aging, diminished parent returns, like a child, to his child, to be soothed and coddled—horrified and repulsed Andrew, with its under- and over-tones of slow agonizing deterioration and absence of dignity. It also struck him as a supreme inconvenience.” The author effectively reinforces the problem of time by narrating the book’s three sections in the past, present, and future tenses, respectively. The plot moves quite slowly, and at 302 pages, the novel is perhaps longer than it needs to be to explore its themes. Even so, Shapiro manages to convincingly capture a man at a pivotal moment in life, when generations shift and new patterns emerge.

A brooding and somewhat meandering novel about growing older and, ideally, wiser.