Foul Ball

 After seeing a recommendation on one of my Facebook groups, I wound up getting Zak Salih's debut novel Let's Get Back to the Party, which frankly feels like it could have used a better editor and some better suggestions on how to tie this mess together. 

This is not to say its not worth a gander, but more that if there's a point to this, it's not particularly obvious, or hidden so well as to be nonexistent. 

The book is bookended by watershed moments, we open on the day the Supreme Court legalized marriage, and we end a few days after the PULSE massacre. In between, we follow around two childhood friends, who's live interact maybe 3 times in the current era of the narrative, and never particularly satisfactorily. 

The first friend we meet is Sebastian, who's moved to the DC suburbs into his father's new home, as his father is teaching for two years on the Carolinas. Sebastian has recently broken up with his boyfriend, who really doesn't want the life Sebastian does. Sebastian's flame dame Dani drags him to a gay wedding, where he encounters Oscar, who grew up in the same neighborhood as him. Indeed, they have a history we get occasional glimpses of. They exchange numbers, and proceed not to contact each other for several pages. 

Oscar, who works for an ad agency and sees gay marriage as a bad thing, since it flies in the face of what he sees gay culture to be, spends the reception on Cruze, eventually arranging a meetup with someone at an older gay bar in DC. Who ghosts him, because yeah. Anyway, Oscar ends up meeting an older activist who wrote a few books celebrating his hedonism and libertine mores as a young man. They form a friendship.

Sebastian, in his job as an AP English and AP Art History teacher at a fairly well off high school, winds up becoming an advisor for the school's LGBTQ+ group. Which is all well and good until he starts getting close to one of his 17 year old students. Not quite Nabokov close, but getting there. (I mean the closest we get to something approaching really inappropriate is Sebastian putting the boy's hoodie on a pillow and cuddling it all night. Everything else that happens between them is really just awkward mildly obsessive stuff.) 

Oscar finds out the author is writing a book about him, and finds that his libertine idol is no longer quite the firebrand he once was. Indeed, the pages Oscar reads aren't celebrations of Oscar's one night stands, but more pity for Oscar. 

At it's heart, the relationship between Oscar and Sebastian is a miss. The brief interactions we see of them as kids basically reflect some of the unfinished business we all bring forward into adulthood, but the shared intimacy here is more like the scene in the US version of Queer as Folk where Michael explains his obsession with Brian. Not deep, but more like a fantasy interrupted. And the fact that both are left with no answers, no resolution, more just a "somebody that I used to know" kind of vibe towards each other.... I realize this is likely a more realistic thing that indeed does happen in real life, but the build up to that unresolved note just isn't present to make me feel much of anything for either character. 

I mean, if Mr. Salih writes something else, I'll read it, since his writing style is interesting, but this novel is a lot underdone.