The central relationship, I should note, is a long friendship between a white cis straight woman and a black cis gay man and Schulman is as attuned to the chasms between their points of view and experiences as she is to their comfortable overlaps, what they can and can't learn from one another, the limits to their exchange, the ways in which their different motivations and desires become incompatible and yet, potentially, traversable. I am taken in by the novel's ethics, the way it teaches its readers, through its characters, how to be in relation to one another. Elegantly structured, it settles the reader in easy, then startles them continually with what both its characters and author are capable of and is stylized as a novel of the late 50s, with a certain drollness and a number of winks to the contemporary moment. This is one of the best novels I have ever read.
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