MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE
by Christopher Tradowsky
Simon & Schuster. 388 pages, $28.99
MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE, Christopher Tradowsky’s debut novel, showcases a love triangle between a gay man and a couple whose sexuality is harder to define, especially given its 1993 setting. Everything about its on-the-nose references (its chapters are all named for classic films) signals that this is a book about and for people who love the movies. But it isn’t cinematic in its own right.
Walter, a recent film school graduate, moves to San Francisco from small-town Ohio for reasons that are never made clear. He gets a crummy temp job and struggles to connect with other gay men as friends or lovers. Then, in a diner one afternoon while on his lunch break, he spots a glamorous stranger with the aura of a French movie star. He’s shocked when the stranger turns out to be “not a woman at all but a young man.” He sees “the gamine” again at the movies, this time accompanied by “the dandy”: a woman dressed in a man’s vintage suit “right on the edge between being handsome and funny looking.”
Bonding over a shared love of classic films, the three become fast friends. Cary, the dandy, is magnetic and full of opinions and ideas; Sasha, the gamine, is a cooler customer. Both are native Californians, Jewish, and “more or less bisexual.” The three dress up in vintage clothes and go out on the town, often watching and dissecting their favorite films. When Cary proposes that she and Walter write a screenplay of their own, their collaboration upends the balance of their relationships.
Midnight contains multiple drafts of this screenplay. With each iteration, Tradowsky misses the chance to have it mirror the threesome’s entanglements or to explore how artists borrow from—and sometimes betray—real life in their work. Instead, he introduces ideas and characters unrelated to the novel’s central plot. Both are bogged down with incidental characters and unnecessary detail. Tradowsky names everything in order to direct what we see—the wall color, the furniture, what people are eating, drinking, and wearing—but we never get to picture it for ourselves, like a movie in our minds.
Despite ’90s references to CDs, Swatch watches, and the like, Midnight at the Cinema Palace is infused with contemporary thinking about gender and sexuality. Given that these are queer people at the epicenter of a community in crisis, the characters have a suspiciously casual attitude toward AIDS. When someone asks, “Why did you swallow this time?” you expect it to be a plot point, not the setup for a joke. By sidestepping the sexual anxiety that shaped gay intimacy in the ’90s, the novel misses what made coming of age for this generation so fraught.
Tradowsky works hard to make San Francisco its own character, giving Cary a long-winded monologue about its charms. “I always feel like I’m in the movies here,” she gushes. Scenes like this underscore the novel’s cinephilia but also its central failing: It broadcasts its ideas rather than exploring them. We’re told about the city’s gentrification, but we don’t see how it can seduce as well as displace, or how adult compromises—such as choosing stability in work or love—can test youthful ideals.
The best coming-of-age novels show their characters wrestling with things that challenge who they think they are and want to be and then, for better or worse, changing. Even after emerging from uncharted emotional and sexual territory, Walter remains the same. He might have worked better as a straight character, startled by his desires yet open to exploring them, and through that process becoming someone surprising even to himself. As written—flabby belly, bad fashion sense, whiny personality—his appeal to others is as much a mystery as what he’s doing in San Francisco in the first place. A dullard like this can’t carry a picture; you need a star. _________________________________________________________________
Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brooklyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue.
