ash's Reviews > Fellow Travelers

This took me so, so long to read because large swathes of it are almost indecipherable if you don't already know like, a lot, about this era of politics -- which I do, actually -- but even that could not make it coherent enough to stay immersed in. I have read quite a few older queer novels, stuff mostly from the 80s and 90s, that use a totally, freely omniscient POV, which is honestly very weird and I'd like a paper about it -- is it queer stuff in particular? I know it was a little bit vogue for a while, but it just seems so common... someone has to have had a thesis by now, right? -- but this was far and away harder to follow than any other one I've read, partially because that POV has been out of style for so long and is genuinely difficult to remember how to parse when you've spent all those years reading much tighter POVs but also specifically because this book is so hellbent on being true to the era that it's like reading another language.

Anyway, this felt very 2007 once I saw that was when it was published and very of the gay misery of the era. I probably would've DNF-ed because it's so clearly Mallon just exorcising his own obsession with the politicking of the time, but the horny Catholic guilt and the often extremely overwrought but still lovely writing kept me hanging on. For more than a month! Insane!

Honestly, I think you could rip the entire middle out of this book and get the point -- no one gets a happy ending, everyone settles -- and I sort of wish I had quit despite how much I highlighted and saved. I wish this book had used Tim and Mary's friendship as the real throughline it so desperately wanted to be because I think there's a really lovely, coherent version of this story that follows their intersecting and intertwining lives even through all the meaningless minutiae Mallon is so desperate to foist on his readers that would have been so impactful and I am going to be sad for such a long time thinking about not getting it.

Frankly the most insulting thing of all to me about this book is that when I borrowed it, I didn't know it was a miniseries or whatever and so I read Hawk and Tim meeting and it was so charming and engaging and then I saw someone mention the show and I'm supposed to believe Matt Bomer could pull off the Hawkins Fuller that lives in this book? Matt Bomer? Get the fuck out of here.