Object of Desire

William J. Mann's novels serve as keyholes into--to borrow a phrase--the souls of gay folk. Family issues, relationship difficulties, the AIDS crisis, the perplexing problems of identity: they've all played their parts in Mann's work.

As a novelist, what is Mann's next challenge? Has he got anywhere left to go? The GLBT community is a large and diverse one, but Mann has covered so much territory already that it seems a fair question: will he deliver a new story that doesn't strain for dramatic credibility to wander too far afield?

With Object of Desire Mann answers the right questions in the right order. Rather than going to unlikely extremes in quest of a good story, Mann takes a closer look at the individual, the framework of family, and the penumbra of society through which we all move along our own paths. Along the way, Mann revisits some eternally relevant themes--but he makes them seem urgent all over again.

The book centers around Danny, a not-quite-young artist just coming into his own professionally. Danny and his husband, Frank, live in Palm Springs; they've been together for twenty years, more or less, and while there's a deep and enduring connection there, time and age have begun to sap the energy from their shared life, especially on Frank's end.

When Danny and Frank got together, Danny was only just entering his 20s, and Frank was in his mid-30s; that age difference has started to catch up to the couple, and with Frank serving as a sort of reminder of Danny's past self, not to mention a memento mori of his future, it's no surprise that Danny (hitting 41 and a mid-life crisis) feels a little panicked and a little restless.

But what puts Danny over the top is a new acquaintance: the much younger, much fresher Kelly, a handsome kid who earns a living as an itinerant bartender.

Unresolved issues from his own youth make Danny especially susceptible to Kelly's oddball charms, not least of which are his gorgeous eyes and his lean, youthful physique. The book explores Danny's issues by flashing back to his boyhood and the tragic events of his 14th birthday, when his older sister went missing, sending Danny's mother on a years-long, crazed quest to find her. It's a relentless and maddening search that all but ejects Danny's father from the family and sends Danny himself spiraling into shadowed recesses of doubt and dejection.

In between the two eras of boyhood and middle age, the book also recounts part of Danny's young adulthood as a dancer in a bar in West Hollywood--the time and place when he first met Frank.

How the three different parts of Danny's life form a whole is a question that the book explores with compassion and no small degree of tenderness. As the story toward a unified wholeness, so does Danny himself. The past and its hurts finds solace in the present, but only after some painful emotional debridement.

Mann has a talent for zeroing in on the tender spots of his audience, and for most gay readers this novel will perhaps resonate more deeply than anything Mann has written since "All American Boy." As a craftsman, though, Mann has grown: "Object of Desire" is articulate and honest... sometimes a little tough in its honesty. It feels like the book we need right about now.