American Scholar
James Fitzgerald likes his life the way it is. He has a stable academic career teaching American literature; a comfortable townhouse in Brooklyn; a satisfying, open marriage with his partner of fifteen years; a sweet and playful young boyfriend; and a recently-published, well-received novel about a famous early-twentieth-century Harvard professor. But his poise is shattered when a woman appears at a book signing bearing a surprise gift: an unsent letter from her brother Gregory, James’ first boyfriend and—ever since Gregory’s sudden death twenty-five years ago—the dark gravitational center of James’ intellectual and emotional life. What follows is a near hallucinatory night of soul-questioning as James, wandering the streets of New York, re-examines his stormy, life-altering relationship with Gregory, a charismatic, self-destructive activist and writer and the real impetus behind James’ new novel.
Rapidly shifting between the late 1980s, when AIDS cut a deadly swath through the gay community, and the dawn of the Trump era, where social media and political polarization threaten another kind of death sentence, American Scholar tells the story of a man driven to discover but afraid to know the truth about himself and his loves past and present. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction!
Paperback, 248 pages
Cover and interior design by Jeremy John Parker
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"American Scholar tells the story of writer and scholar James Fitzgerald, as an unsure graduate student during the dark days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, as well as a married man in the present at odds with his husband over whether or not to have children. The novel makes use of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney's love story, as well as Matthiessen's scholarship, building on both to tell a story that is timely, poignant, and moving." - Scott Bane, author of A Union Like Ours
"Patrick E. Horrigan's American Scholar is an exquisite and soulful leap into the landscape of love and memory, literature and history. Sexy and moving, the book is a masterful fugue on how we unravel the mystery of our lives and loves." - Tim Miller, performer and author of A Body in the O "Horrigan deftly incorporates a heady and inviting series of references to great queer authors (Woolf, Forster, Baldwin, Melville, and Matthiessen) while evoking, especially, the quickly shifting and history-making moment of the late 1980s, when queer theory was born and countless gays lost their lives to a relentless disease. The novel, both lyrical and tough-minded, tracks these epochs with grace, tenderness, erotic frisson, critical intelligence, and plangent skill. It's a novel of ideas, an inspired piece of autofiction, and a work to which I will often return." - David Greven, author of Men Beyond Desire |
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