MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE

Young movie lovers discover friendship, glamour, and heartache in 1990s San Francisco.

Before tech took over San Francisco, before cellphones but after the terrible reign of AIDS, there were the gleeful revels of the ’90s. Tradowsky’s ornate novel is a love letter to a foggy, analog metropolis lit up with nightlife and art, queer friendship and desire, movie houses and day jobs, and 20-somethings aching to define themselves. Recently graduated film major Walter Simmering, out of the closet but unsure of his persona, is the Henry James ingenue or Dorothy Gale of the novel, collecting a vivacious entourage as he wanders a dazzling new city. He has never been in love, but San Francisco is quick to provide fodder for adoration and, in time, a neonoir science-fiction screenplay that becomes a clever counterpoint to the novel’s narrative. The reader will be as smitten as Walter is with his new friends, especially social butterfly Cary, a quippy chanteuse in menswear, and Sasha, lithe in women’s finery he also designs; they bewitch Walter with their breezy understanding of the nebulousness of gender and sexuality. Lawrence, an older gay man living with AIDS, is a link to past eras of San Francisco and Hollywood, while Jeff, a technophile grad student, already knows about cyberspace. Dreamer Walter projects his own mirages “onto the beautiful, gritty, eucalyptus-and-urine-scented streets of San Francisco” and mulls over identity and authenticity. At night, friends, exes, and crushes try cocktails, make out while “practically radioactive with pheromones,” banter, bicker, and guzzle classic films; connoisseurs of nostalgia and irony, they hold tight to “a golden age they were born too late to see.” Tradowsky, who teaches art history, devotes ample space to San Francisco’s showy architecture and the interiors of the characters’ apartments, workplaces, and nocturnal haunts. The novel is laden with period references, which will school newcomers to the ’90s and create a fusillade of associations for those who lived them.

Readers will pine for a playlist of jazz standards, a double feature, a Mission burrito, and a ticket to SFO—past or present.