| Summary Note |
Part coming-of-age story and part novel of erotic discovery, part queer take on Southern Gothic and part detection-mystery thriller, this novel teases us with the question of what Charles Dickens' Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues, racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle, that galvanized the world in those decades. Like Dickens's Pip, Newt Seward yearns to escape his small-town upbringing in the mountains of Virginia. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric old bachelor with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's worldly visiting niece and nephew--these events set the stage for a surprising announcement that launches the youth on a journey of sexual and moral discovery, one that takes him to prep school in New England, bohemian digs in Rome, and discovery in Paris--all before he returns home to life's many expectations and disappointments. This inventive response to Great Expectations quickly leaps beyond the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to become a gripping contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family. |
