The Men from the Boys
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
This classic novel by bestselling author William J. Mann features a gay man trying to come to terms with sex, friendship, aging, and falling—and staying—in love
This stunning slice of gay life at the turn of the millennium introduces thirtysomething Jeff O’Brien. After six years, his lover, Lloyd, has just announced that the passion between them has died. Terrified of ending up alone, Jeff turns his eye toward other men. But the anonymous, impersonal encounters leave him feeling sordid and used. In search of love during this “last summer in which I am to be young,” he finds romance with a beautiful houseboy named Eduardo. At twenty-two, Eduardo is the same age Jeff was when he began a relationship with the older David Javitz, a leading activist now gravely ill with AIDS. But David became more than a lover to Jeff, who wasn’t yet out of the closet. He was his mentor and cherished friend.
Narrated by Jeff, who’s caught between the baby boomers and generation X, the novel shuttles between summers in Provincetown and winters in Boston. The Men from the Boys is about the illusive nature of love and desire—“the magic that happens across a dance floor,” leaving you “forever young.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What begins as a novel look at gay life from Stonewall to Generation X ends as a New Age guidance novel along the lines of The Alchemist or The Celestine Prophecy. This said, Massachusetts journalist Mann is no Paulo Coelho or James Redfield, and his book lacks both the straightforward pragmatism and the easy occultism that make those authors bestsellers. At 32, Jeffrey O'Brien has reached a crisis in his seven-year relationship. As he tries to reconcile the casual sexual habits of his youth with the exigencies of long-term love and searches for meaning and balance, his friends and acquaintances seem less like characters than representatives of their generations, personified answers to Jeffrey's questions: there's his lover, a 60-ish watercolorist; his AIDS-afflicted 40-something ex-lover; and his 20-year-old crush. By the end of the novel, naturalistic dialogue has given way almost entirely to characters holding forth in expositions of various life lessons. As a guide to gay life in the 1990s, it should have been more direct; as a novel, it should have been considerably more artful.
