Fellow Travelers is set in early-to-mid-1950's Washington D.C. It chronicles the story of young Irish-American, devout Catholic, passionate anti-Communist, and gay Timothy Laughlin, fresh out of Fordham and hired to work as a Republican senator's aide. By chance he meets handsome State Department official Hawkins Fuller, an experienced, cynical, and perhaps borderline-bitter mover, shaker, and quasi-predator. A love affair ensues. Or, rather, Tim's love affair with Hawkins ensues. For Hawkins, it appears to be a dalliance, a diversion. But appearances can be deceiving; self-deceiving, even.

The novel traces the lives of these two characters, chronicling Tim's debilitating guilt (he's Catholic!) and attempts to cleanse himself and his life of Fuller. Mallon interweaves into this story additional stories of major and minor players in the Joe McCarthy/HUAC melodrama that gripped Washington and the country in the mid-Fifties.

The narrative closes tragic; trivially tragic, really, but isn't that what's devastating about most personal tragedy? Even so, a thread of redemptivity runs through the whole thing; and isn't that also pretty much like life?

The writer's style is utterly unsentimental, but for all that, he manages to capture the pathos of trying to live gay and whole in 1950's America. No need for the unsentimental among us to roll their eyes over a cliché, weepy soap-opera-like delivery here. The emotional tone is achieved through understatement and is characterized by a matter-of-fact elegance and economy. And yet the oppressiveness of the tragedy is almost smothering, perhaps precisely because it's so mundane and matter-of-fact, and actually, given the historical milieu, so to-be-expected.

In any case, I think it's a first-rate effort, and to those of you who like to read well-written novels that draw you in, I commend this book.

 

Adam Phillips is the pseudonym of the author of Cross Currents, an ongoing story about two young men who find they love each other despite being straight.  When he isn't writing, or thinking about the complexities of sexuality, he's a father and lectures in community college maths. 

 Yahoo Group | Email 

 

The writer's style is utterly unsentimental, but for all that, he manages to capture the pathos of trying to live gay and whole in 1950's America. No need for the unsentimental among us to roll their eyes over a cliché, weepy soap-opera-like delivery here. The emotional tone is achieved through understatement and is characterized by a matter-of-fact elegance and economy. And yet the oppressiveness of the tragedy is almost smothering, perhaps precisely because it's so mundane and matter-of-fact, and actually, given the historical milieu, so to-be-expected.