The Town of Babylon: A Novel - Hardcover

Varela, Alejandro

 
9781662601033: The Town of Babylon: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1662601034 ISBN 13: 9781662601033
Verlag: Astra House, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE 

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022 – Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, LitHub, Electric Literature, LGBTQ Reads, Latinx in Publishing

*Recommended by The New York Times*

In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His writing has appeared in the Point Magazine, Boston Review, Harper's, Split Lip, the Georgia Review, the Rumpus, the Brooklyn Rail, the Offing, and the New Republic, among other publications. He is a 2019 Jerome Fellow in Literature. He was a resident in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2017–2018 Workspace program and a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction. Alejandro is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal. His graduate studies were in public health. His first book, The Town of Babylon, was published by Astra House in 2022. His second book, The People Who Report More Stress, is forthcoming (Astra House, 2023). Varela believes strongly in reparations, land back, a national health service, and a thirty dollar minimum wage pegged to inflation as interventions essential for the collective liberation of our society. Access his work at alejandrovarela.work. You can also find him on Twitter and IG: @drovarela.

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A novel about suburban malaise, following Andres, a gay Latinx professor, returning to his hometown for a twenty-year high school reunion.

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1. SIDEWALKS


The alumni newsletter was sitting on my bed atop a small pyramid of neatly folded towels. It had a January postmark, but the glossy pamphlet remained crisp, no doubt due to my mother’s care. On the back, among a scattershot of exclamatory text, it read, “Mark your calendars, Class of ’97! Reunion this July! Check St. Iggy’s Facebook for updates!” After mulling it over for a couple days, I visited St. Ignatius’s alumni page this afternoon.

THE DAY HAS ARRIVED!!! 7 p.m. UNTIL ***WHENEVER***(JOE’S RISTORANTE CLOSES AT 11 p.m., BUT DRINKS AT MCCLAIN’SPUB & LOUNGE AFTER!!! LOL. YOLO! RSVP ASAP.)

I endeavor in life never to be anything more than defensively prejudiced—certainly not haughty—but this sort of unbridled use of capital letters andacronyms should have been omen enough to keep me home.

•••

Over the last twenty years, these reunions had fleeted through my mind on occasion, the way I might envision a free fall or planes crashing into build-ings, which is to say briefly and, at times, with a shudder. I feared, in those moments, the possibility of reviving the past, of slipping irretrievably into
its grasp—lamenting, obsessing. Something akin to speaking aloud a long-held secret on the verge of being forgotten. Better left forgotten. In a matter of minutes, all of this will change. Twenty years of abstention, of keeping the past where it belongs, will come to an end.

To complicate matters, I hadn’t packed anything appropriate to wear. Is there a standard attire for this sort of occasion? How does one dress fortheir past? More specifically, a past inside of a present-day Italian restaurant established in 1975, and since remodeled four times, once by each new
owner—Italian, Italian American, Puerto Rican, and most recently an immigrant from Kerala. The communist state of India, Kerala is arguably the healthiest and happiest region in the subcontinent. A state whose successes never seem to appear amid the popular images of Indian poverty, Indian elephants, Indian river-bathing, and Indian yogis. I know very little about India, but if I hadn’t just mentioned this about Kerala, I’d have been as remiss as everyone else.

Joe’s, the Italian restaurant, is six unformed, halfway-harrowing blocks from my parents’ home, the home of my youth. Six city blocks aren’t much by way of distance. In the city, every block is a microvillage worthy of recognition. Together, six blocks might constitute an entire neighborhood,
possibly two, each with its own abiding culture. Here in the suburbs, however, the block is a nearly inconsequential unit of measurement. Here, all movement is coordinate based: the corner of Main and East 6th or behind the Friendly’s or you know, the old yellow house with the POW flag? Distance is also measured in time: twelve minutes door to door or twenty-five minutes without traffic or I did it in under an hour cuz there were no cops. And there is no minimum distance for traveling by car. No one walks anywhere, at any time—especially if the stretch of land in question is a six-lane commercial corridor flankedby incomplete sidewalks and a coarse layer of crushed gravel whose low, Wild-West plumes of gray dust materialize at each step.

•••

The people in the cars zooming past me, if they have taken notice, assume I’m poor, homeless, high, or here illegally, and likely all of the above. If they’ve given me a closer look—fitted, dark green slacks; summery white linen long-sleeve button-down shirt open somewhat seductively to mid-sternum; brown skin—they might be confused. They might be telling themselves I’m lost or stranded. In their defense, I am the sole person standing on this narrow ledge of pseudo-sidewalk, which ends in about fifty feet. From here, I move onto a borderless tract of wispy grass that appears to have sprouted from the surrounding dirt or from one of the muddy microlagoons that licks its edges, like hair on a pubescent chin or on a dome of advanced age—the alpha or the omega. These anomalous moments of nature are proof that there was once another landscape tucked beneath this capitalist afterthought.

Everyone is racing. To or from a mall, I presume. To buy or return something. To eat, to drink, to bowl, to dance, to watch a movie, or just linger. Doesn’t matter if the mall is a short strip with four or five nearly identical, neon-emblazoned storefronts; a behemoth with multiple entrances, foodcourts, and endless parking; or a sprawling megaplex, as wide as it is gaudy, moated by acres of parking. Doesn’t matter. Everyone is eager to get there, which is of particular consequence to me because to reach Joe’s, the Italian restaurant, I’ll have to wait on the tip of this islet for a breach in traffic.

At least it’s summer. At least the dusky sky is a distracting swirl of pinks, oranges, and purples spreading upward from the horizon, as if there were afire in the distance. A fire that is more or less under control. At least.


It’s almost 8 p.m., and there’s a slow drip from my armpits. If I back out now, no one will be the wiser—I didn’t RSVP. I require only a modicum of temerity and a plan. The route home is simple: turn around, circumnavigate the archipelago of sidewalk islands, cut through one football field–sized parking lot, then camp out at the Applebee’s until my parents have gone to bed. Or I could head straight home now, admit defeat, and sit in front of the television set with my father, who’s probably going to die soon—not today, but sooner than later.

“We’ve excised all of the damaged portions of his large intestine. But his fatty liver and diabetes require care, beginning with a reduction in carbohydrates, salt, beer, and wine,” my father’s doctor explained in the waiting room, nearly three weeks ago. She had a rock climber’s steely frame and thematter-of-fact cadence of a small-town mechanic, which left us believing that everything would be okay for now, but one day, it wouldn’t be.

“Por favor, vente a casa. He listens to you,” my mother pleaded with me last week. “I tell him something, and he says, ‘We’re all going to die some-day,’ but when you say it, he listens.”

“I can come home this weekend.”

“In the hospital, he promised me he would try, but he’s already eating papa y arroz y esa carne guisada que le gusta tanto. He sneaks away to el Dominicano. Their portions aren’t for old people. Restaurant food is not healthy. And he’s not supposed to be driving.”

“Mom—”

“A few nights ago, tomó vino. There wasn’t much left, but he’s not allowed to have any wine. I can’t do it on my own. I have to go back to work, and my back hurts from helping him out of bed, off the toilet, in and out ofthe car. The doctor says it could be months until he has his strength again.”

“Mom, I said yes.”

“Oh, mi amor! Gracias! You’re so good to us. Will Marco come, too?”

“No. I told you, he has his work trip.”

“Oh! I forgot—”

“It’s fine. It didn’t make sense for me to travel with him. He’ll be busy.” After a brief pause and some audible breathing, my mother asked if everything was okay between us.

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Well, you know your relationship better than I do,” she said, with anomniscient tenor that was more irksome than comforting.


A small fissure in the traffic continuum...

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Verlag
Astra House
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1662601034
ISBN 13 
9781662601033
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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