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LET'S GET BACK TO THE PARTY by Zak Salih

LET'S GET BACK TO THE PARTY

by Zak Salih

Pub Date: Feb. 16th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61620-957-5
Publisher: Algonquin

Two childhood friends reconnect in their 30s with life-changing consequences.

It’s the summer of 2015, a year before the massacre of 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. Sebastian Mote is a high school art history teacher in a suburb of Washington, D.C., reeling from the end of a three-year relationship. He wants to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality verdict; some children and a house in the suburbs with raised flower beds would be great, too. His childhood friend Oscar Burnham is a “proud queer” who can’t fathom why any gay man would want to settle for marriage like a “breeder." One night at a gay bar, he confronts a woman who’s part of a bachelorette party after she condescendingly says, “God, I love my gays,” aggressively shaming her into leaving. Sebastian and Oscar narrate alternating chapters of the novel. After they run into each other in D.C., Oscar thinks a visit to Sebastian's house makes him feel “like [he's] stumbled into a diorama in a natural history museum labeled Homo americanus domesticus.” There’s a deep tension between the two that’s sexual but also political: Neither can entirely stomach the life the other has chosen. But to Salih’s credit, the narrators’ personalities don’t fall into tidy moral demarcations; Sebastian, who isn’t adventurous, dangerously pines for one of his 17-year-old students, and Oscar, who has a robust sex life, might just want a steady relationship if he’d admit that to himself.

An insightful examination of two of the many ways gay men present themselves in contemporary America.