CASANOVA 20

Two friends face their own erasure in this post-pandemic meditation on love, sex, and mortality.

Since earliest childhood, Adrian has been desired with a fervor that approaches religious ecstasy. Though his beauty imperils him as a child, Adrian grows out of the cloistered life his fearful family has provided for him and moves to New York City, where he parlays it—his term for his enduring sex appeal—into a life of feckless comfort sponsored by literally thousands of friends. Adrian’s desirability only grows in power through his 20s, and he rides out the city’s Covid-19 isolation fully expecting to be able to return to a life where he “can be in love with anyone” as soon as a vaccine is available. Yet, when the masks come off, Adrian discovers that the previously unflagging power of it has waned, or at least become less universal in its appeal. To his horror, Adrian decides that, like other people, he may be “just as anonymous with his mask on as without.” Meanwhile, Mark, a renowned painter and one of Adrian’s very few real friends, has weathered the pandemic shutdown in his childhood home in Northern California, attending to both his mother and then his sister as they succumb to a brutal autoimmune condition with which Mark has also been diagnosed. Thirty years older than Adrian and still grieving the loss of his husband, Arturo, Mark is immune to it, and the feelings he has toward Adrian are protective rather than proprietary. However, as Mark’s condition worsens and Adrian’s it continues to wane, both men must find the answer to the questions they ask as their worlds inexorably alter (am I memorable? can I be seen?) in the light of the other’s enduring care. The novel’s conceit is big, its prose attention-grabbing, its sexual joie de vivre propulsive, but, in the end, the most compelling part is the tender nuance of its central characters as they love both each other and the world. The result is a rare gem of a book—afraid of neither joy nor sorrow and patient enough to find the human heart inside all its gorgeous language.

A show-stopping novel that carries within it a quiet, steadfast heart.