Read more
A captivating tale by the author Tony Kushner calls "a writer of immense gifts, with a voice--smart, playful, lyrical, subtle, unsparing--utterly unlike anyone else's."
Growing up in the sixties, Elliott Biddler and Tom Amelio are gay first cousins who live several states apart. Their parents are estranged, and they share little in common besides a need to make the honor roll and an interest in foreign languages. Cautious Tom, the first Amelio to go to college, attends Purdue on a wrestling scholarship while Elliott, a reckless charmer with daddy issues, is an Ivy League French major who gets lost in translation his junior year abroad.
Building post-graduate lives in the crucible of the Reagan Recession, the cousins navigate the closet and the office, learning hard, hilarious lessons about resume boosting, libidinous co-workers, Italian suffixes, men in toupees, and frozen condoms. The summer of 1985 finds them in Manhattan, where their differing approaches to the AIDS crisis leads Tom to a deeper understanding of which things matter and what things cost.
By novel's end, Elliott is guttering out by his lonesome in a studio apartment on the Ile St. Louis. He invites Tom, whose life has stalled in a Denver law firm, abroad for the first time. As they tour the streets of Paris on Elliott's Trail of Tears and prepare for the society wedding of his old college boyfriend, Elliott tries to impress upon Tom his final thoughts on the conduct of living.
Spanning the Age of Aquarius to the ACT-UP era, and told in varying perspectives, the stories in Let Me See It are marked with the rueful blend of comedy and tenderness that Magruder brought to Sugarless, his fiction debut that Publishers Weekly said "captures the struggles of teenagers, straight and gay, of every generation" and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted the William Saroyan International Writing Prize.
About the author
James Magruder is a fiction writer, playwright, and award-winning translator. He teaches dramaturgy at Swarthmore College and fiction at the University of Baltimore. He is also the author of a novel,
Sugarless (2009).
Summary
James Magruder's collection of linked stories follows two gay cousins, Tom and Elliott, from adolescence in the 1970s to adulthood in the early '90s. With a rueful blend of comedy and tenderness, Magruder depicts their attempts to navigate the closet and the office and the lessons they learn about libidinous co-workers, resume boosting, Italian suffixes, and frozen condoms.
