RIVER CROSSED

In Spang’s literary novel, a closeted man searches for identity in Vietnam War–era West Virginia.

The Vietnam War is raging, and Jason Follett isn’t sure what terrifies him more: the fact that he might get drafted, or the fact that he might be gay. The Chicago-raised, Vanderbilt Divinity School–educated young man needs time and space to figure himself out, and so he takes a job as the Head Start director in the small, rural town of Pearsall Flats, West Virginia. He rents an apartment from a local minister and his wife with a view of the Potomac River, part of a vacation property that the minister allows some friends to use for extramarital trysts. He befriends Carole Goldsmith, a preacher’s wife and fellow Head Start director who, like Jason, has no idea what she’s doing. The Goldsmiths provide Jason with a surrogate family as he struggles to get the churches of Pearsall Flats to accept a “Yankee” non-religious daycare open to both white and Black children. Though Jason is still in the closet—and dating women in order to keep it that way—he cannot help but come across men who, openly or not, share his attraction to other men. There’s the confirmed bachelor opera buff, the handsome tenant farmer, the glue-sniffing high school achiever, the interracial couple, and even Jason’s minister landlord. “I wouldn’t call it that,” the minister answers with a laugh when Jason asks him, directly, if he’s gay. “I just prefer men…Can we leave it at that?” Jason makes his way between and around these men with a mix of longing and revulsion until he meets Eric Kendrick, a painter and health counselor who lives in the open. Jason falls for Eric, but is he ready to commit to a marginalized identity, or should he take his chances with Debra, a volunteer and idealist with whom he might be able to lead a more conventional life?

Spang captures Jason’s inner turmoil in plainspoken prose, as here when he contemplates his path, Thoreau-like, while gazing over the nearby river, wondering, “I could forget if I were gay or straight, if I should rip up Eric’s card or call him up, if I should start dating someone else, if I should be as others wanted me to be, or if I should be myself. If, indeed, I knew what I was.” The setting is a rich one, and Spang does a fine job playing Jason’s artistic ambitions and Great Society idealism against the complex religiosity of both the people he meets and of Jason himself. The plot offers few real surprises, however, and for this reason its nearly 400-page length feels much too long. The text often reads like a memoir, lacking the immediacy or dynamism of fiction. Even when startling things happen—like a deadly fire that kills a child—they can land with a thud. The novel will likely appeal most to readers with their own memories of the time period, when it was much harder for people to openly be themselves.

An earnest novel of self-discovery and sexuality.