GLR May-June 2025

mudgeon with fast-progressing multiple sclerosis, has had bal ance problems and has fallen in the bathtub a few times. His doc tor insists that he use a wheelchair when he leaves his apartment. An agency sends Tavish a walker, a fresh-faced 23-year-old straight man named Danny whose job it is to wheel Tavish around the city three days a week. As weeks go by, Tavish rues the changes to his city: old churches converted to condominiums; glass and steel columns replacing Victorian houses. He laments having never had children, notices the deterioration of his older bridge club players, and bemoans the disappearance of gay clubs that he used to frequent. Eventually, Tavish comes to feel real af fection for Danny (and his toddler daughter Stella), and, against the advice of his bridge friend, he invites Danny and Stella to live with him in an extra bedroom. Now at least he will have some one to talk with and to take to the theater. The unifying character holding these stories together is the city of Boston itself. Characters from all the stories know and frequent the same places: the Crumble, a coffee-and-pastry restaurant; Sporters, a gay bar; another gay bar, Cru/Cuts; the same parks, theaters, and cruising areas. Even for someone like me who has never seen Boston, Gambone makes it easy to “feel” the city’s personality and to recognize the ways in which it has shaped the lives of these characters. We also get the feeling that, even though Boston is a large city, the characters live in a small, tightly packed enclave. Thus it doesn’t surprise us when Harry, the eighty-year-old painter in “The Portrait,” shows up at the opening of Raul’s art show in “Zigzag,” the final story. Throughout these stories, Gambone’s writing is economical and unadorned, but affectionate and precise in its detail. Several times I was reminded of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man . Both books are humane, knowing, sexy, and honest about the joys and frustrations of gay men in the autumn of their lives, and both display a palpable compassion for their characters. Gam bone apparently reveres these older men, the pioneers of gay identity and survivors of great loss. Their stories are part of the history of this generation of gay men. _______________________________________________________ Hank Trout is the former editor of A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.

pushing at the boundaries of the genre.” Housemates is similarly genre-defying. In her acknowl edgements, the author writes: “I did not write a historical novel about [art photographer Berenice] Abbott and [art critic Eliza beth] McCausland in part because it already exists”—a refer ence to The Realist , by Sarah Coleman. However, Eisenberg’s central characters, working-class Bernie Abbott from rural Penn sylvania and middle-class Leah McCausland from Manhattan, seem to have clear origins in the real world. The novel blurs the boundaries of several genres: contemporary lesbian romance (complicated by lesbian community politics), Künstlerroman (a narrative about the development of an artist), and documentaries about American regions outside the cultural mainstream. Bernie and Leah are described in the first chapter by an un named narrator who observes them planning a road trip to gether in a coffee shop in Philadelphia and wants to learn everything she can about them. The female narrator seems iso lated and depressed after the death of a woman with whom she shared much of her life. The narrator says: “I’ll call her what they called me in her obituary: ... ‘housemate.’” The narrator clearly belongs to a more closeted generation than twenty somethings Bernie and Leah. The narrative viewpoint soon becomes that of the painfully self-conscious Leah. She is a freelance writer at loose ends, want ing to do something culturally important, possibly to compensate for her body, which has always been seen as fat. She sees her fe male partner Alex as a “real” journalist because she works for a local newspaper. Leah knows that in the past “a duo of photog rapher and writer [Walker Evans and James Agee] had driven around America for an extended road trip as it was then, with both photographs and words. … The idea was, fundamentally, that the sum of the two forms was larger than either form could ever be alone. The photographs were not illustrations of the sen tences and the words were not captions for the images.” A hypo thetical partnership between a writer and a photographer already appeals to Leah even before a golden opportunity presents itself. Alex and Leah belong to a lesbian housing collective that accepts Bernie, a photographer who favors an old-fashioned method she learned from Daniel Dunne, an eccentric professor who has fallen into disrepute because of his “inappropriate” be havior toward students. In several ways, Bernie does not meet the collective’s standards of “political correctness,” but Leah fears that she doesn’t either. Each character is shown to be isolated in some sense, yet Bernie unexpectedly finds herself the heir of Daniel Dunne, who has died from alcohol poisoning, whether deliberately or not. A call from a lawyer lets her know that he left her a shack in the woods containing all of his equipment and his cache of unique photos. This windfall provides Bernie not only with ma terial goods but also with what she sees as a moral responsibil ity to continue Dunne’s work. Leah offers Bernie a deal: they can take a road trip through rural Pennsylvania and collaborate on a photographic and written record of their discoveries. Since Bernie has no car and Leah can’t drive, Alex allows them to use her car for this trip. During the journey, Leah, a sensitive butch, learns to trust Bernie, a self-reliant femme, and they come to understand them selves in relation to each other. They bring their different sen sibilities to bear on small towns, Amish families, and local

Carmates: A Romance

J EAN R OBERTA

HOUSEMATES: A Novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg Hogarth (Random House). 352 pages, $29. E connections to both cities are evident in her new novel House mates . Her first book was The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (2020), a work of non fiction about the “Rainbow Murders” of two young women killed while hitchhiking in 1980. One reviewer described it as “part of a new wave of books upending true crime tropes and MMA COPLEY EISENBERG, a New York City native, now seems firmly rooted in Philadelphia, where she/they cofounded “a community hub for the literary arts.” Her

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