Man about Town
Categories: Rediscoveries , Fiction , Gay & Lesbian
Mark Merlis’s 2003 novel, Man about Town, is a low-key but wonderfully resonant story of midlife crisis. Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress. It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking.
He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years. Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.
Then Sam leaves him. And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients. Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife.
And what were those things? He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine. It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was.
What happened to that sense of golden possibility in his life? Joe decides that the way to recover it is to track down the boy from the ad.
Joe, who thinks far too much for his own good, is a marvelous character through which to explore that universal human moment of stock-taking at midlife, when decades of choices, conscious and unconscious, suddenly appear to have led one far down an unanticipated path. His quixotic quest to find the boy in the picture and find his way back to the life he hoped for is thoughtful, funny, and affecting.
