There is an engaging surface simplicity to "The City Kid"'s account of
the not-so-unusual relationship between a middle-aged gay man and a
morose
teenage lad, whose paths cross at a nude beach one sunny San Francisco
day, which belies this story's acute wisdom and emotional complexity.
Paul Reidinger, whose writing purrs and whose thinking hums, captures
other moments of contemporary queer life with invigorating honesty: the
ongoing friendships of gay men and straight women who figured out on the
threshold of adulthood that they weren't meant for romance with each
other;
the covert hypocrisy of the closet door slammed on the self; the
hard-thought-through comfort of a single man aging alone who comes to
trust his own worth; the tug of war between lust and common sense.
Mix those tensions with the angry, muddled yearning of a confused,
sexy, sulky 16-year-old desperate for a father, and the result is a sagely
satisfying read. And why, after all, is the relationship between a man
over 40 and a boy under 20 not unusual? Because many gay men do serve as
mentors to younger men, and not all of those boys know whether they themselves
are gay, a worrisome truth that is one of the skillful knots untangled in
this tidy, intricate novel.
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