FLORIDIAN NIGHTS

A middle-aged gay man pieces his life back together in a romance set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Thirty-five-year-old New Yorker Gary Gaines’ longtime boyfriend and partner Becker died of a heart attack three years ago, in 1985, and he’s still reeling from the loss. Then he meets a handsome, 22-year-old waiter named Rick, and they begin a torrid, often tumultuous, love affair. In some ways, this is a familiar story: Gary is a jaded urbanite, haunted by the deaths of his friends from AIDS, while Rick is a transplant from the Midwest—“A little town called St. Trier, Minnesota”—and an aspiring singer who fled to the city to realize his dreams. The novel plays out as a clash of generations, exploring a queer relationship following one man who came of age before HIV and another who came of age after its emergence. Ringel impresses with his nuanced depiction of this generational divide; sexual tension combines with jealousy as Rick desires everything that Gary had and lost. After Gary has his own HIV–related scare and loses his job writing reports at a nameless World Trade Center office, he leaves New York, bound for his parents’ home near Tampa Bay, Florida. This adventure lends the novel its dreamy title; when Rick, too, arrives in Florida to visit Gary, the two embark on a quixotic road trip across the state to bury the past and welcome the future. In this novel’s finest hours—often at night, during caustic exchanges between Rick and Gary—it feels like a brilliant stage play, as the verbal sparring smartly highlights queer culture and generational differences. However, the work is far less adept at tackling race-related issues, which it does via relatively flat conversations involving two characters of Japanese descent: Gary’s brother-in-law, Gil Sukigawa, and a new acquaintance, Keiko Miyama. For the most part, though, this is a solid trip that readers won’t regret taking.

A rich, character-driven foray into a harrowing time.