Zak Salih's searching, incisive debut novel finds two gay millennial men making sense of their place in the culture, the struggle and each other's lives circa 2015, not long after the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States--and not long before the shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub. Sebastian, a high-school art history teacher, quails at hookup culture and mentors LGBTQ students whose freedoms he wishes he had enjoyed growing up.
Meanwhile, Oscar, a friend of Sebastian from childhood, cruises Washington, D.C., with his hookup app, outraged at what he sees as the mainstreaming of gay life, a phenomenon exemplified by conventional weddings and the omnipresence of straight women at gay bars. Estranged for decades, Salih's dual protagonists spend the novel circling and avoiding each other, a dance of love, friendship and self-definition: each represents, in many ways, what the other believes gay men should not be.
Each becomes movingly entwined with a representative of another generation of gay life. A teen student, so out and open, fascinates Sebastian, while Oscar becomes a sort of muse to a towering figure of late 20th-century gay literature, a defiant Greenwich Village hedonist who chronicled his prodigious sexual feats in books until his subject shifted, in the 1980s, to the memorialization of a dying generation. A contemporary American meditation on gay life, Salih's novel thrums with details and moments that keep the material from ever edging toward the schematic. Instead, Let's Get Back to the Party is as rich in feeling and compelling in its storytelling as it is acute in its analysis. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor