Quit the Race
by Jonathan Strong
Pressed Wafer Press. 335 pages, $15.
THE NATION magazine once hailed Jonathan Strong as “a writer who can speak for the sixties as Salinger did for the fifties.” Over a five-decade career, Strong has published more than a dozen novels and other works of fiction. If his early work focused on “the rapture and despair of youth,” as James Morrison stated in his 1993 entry in Contemporary Gay American Novelists (1993), Strong’s new novel, Quit the Race, deals with the challenges of old age. A persistent theme of his writing, the difficulty of knowing another person or even of knowing one’s own heart, permeates this latest addition to his impressive œuvre.
In the novel, 65-year-old Sean Tyson and Joel Greenwood are “a funny enough pair.” After more than three decades together, they live fairly contentedly in a too tidy, almost paid-off apartment in Chicago. Each is still happily employed, Sean as a socialist-leaning agent in a housing collective, Joel as a composer and prep school music teacher. On the surface, their lives are good. “If you counted the entire population of the earth,” Joel tells Sean, “we ourselves would be in the top 1 percent.” But just below the surface, their relationship is freighted with many of the encumbrances of long-time couples: they’ve heard all of each other’s stories many times; they are disinclined to exercise, and their bodies—stiff joints, a slight unsteadiness of step—are showing the signs of time and change. In bed at night, they have “increasingly rare bouts of intimacy.”
Joel thinks that Sean, who has been at the same job for over forty years, is a stick-in-the-mud. “You’ve done enough good for the world,” he tells his partner. For his part, Sean, despite occasional dalliances with Internet porn and mooning over younger guys, is confident in his devotion to Joel. But he worries that Joel’s life—richer, fuller, more adventurous—is drifting away from his own. Sean is beset with anxiety that the life he has known for so many years—“that one and only home, that ever-present man beside him”—is coming to an end. The future scares him, and there’s so much less of it to count on.
Sure enough, Joel starts getting itchy to move out of the city and resettle in the Wisconsin countryside of his youth, where he thinks he’ll be able to write better music, “like Mahler hearing the alpine cowbells.” He rhapsodizes to his partner: “We can be two old goats together up there and quit the race.” This plan does not reassure Sean, who becomes haunted by the notion that they will drift toward separate ends. It doesn’t help that their friend Sheila tells him: “I like watching things break down.” Joel’s frustration with Sean’s unwillingness to consider a move erupts every now and then in angry accusations or barbed teasing. When Sean receives an unexpected inheritance of $100,000, the possibility of owning country property suddenly becomes more real, and the stakes escalate.
In the second part of the novel, Sean and Joel drive up to Wisconsin to look at property. “This is really more Joel’s thing,” Sean tells the real estate agent. “I’m open to looking, but I’m pretty attached to Chicago.” She tells them warily: “If you don’t see eye to eye, buying a vacation home or, even worse, one for retirement, could be the first step toward divorce.” Gradually, though, Sean begins to come around to the idea. If they’re lucky, he thinks, they can still be happy together, at least until one of them dies. As the novel unfolds, further challenges, roadblocks, and anxieties keep the pair from achieving a simple or neat resolution.
At one point we learn that Sean likes “realistic stories of everyday lives.” This is exactly the kind of novel that Strong has written. As such, there is much to admire. The fact that its protagonists are two aging gay men is enough to distinguish it from the pack of modern gay novels. Strong’s familiarity with classical music, and his use of it as a metaphor for Sean and Joel’s contest of wills, is impressive. Running through the novel is Joel’s struggle to compose a piece based on a poem by Longfellow, a poem Sean has chosen for him, about “growing old and everybody drifting apart and never being one again.” Moreover, the premise of the novel—that even after so many years together, an unrecognized but crucial difference between the two members of a couple may suddenly burst forth—is very credible.
Curiously, there are a few slips that one wouldn’t expect from a veteran writer. For my taste, Strong is too fond of dialogue that conveniently supplies backstory information. And he has a penchant for superfluous details that don’t contribute much to the novel’s scheme. Why, for example, do we need to know that the LaSalle Bank is now called the Bank of America? (Other details—like the fact that Sean and Joel have cornflakes and pomegranate juice for breakfast—are perfect.) Some of the novel’s subplots—one in which Sean picks up a street kid for sex; another (in flashback) about his discovery that his father was gay—are not fully developed. Strong seems to be wrestling with the place of sex in a long-term relationship, but he shies away from fully exploring it.
Despite these quibbles, this is an impressive piece of work. I came away from it realizing that I’d read an adult novel written for serious readers of fiction. It explores a question we seldom encounter in gay literature: how can two men grow old together? And its answer is nuanced, mature, and quietly sad. Kudos, too, to Pressed Wafer Press for putting out such a handsome volume, reminding us that a physical book is still a pleasure to read.
Philip Gambone is the author of four books, including the novel Beijing (Wisconsin).
