One might find the works of Jonathan Ascher, the fictional '60s radical at the center of JD, shelved near Allen Ginsberg or Abbie Hoffman. His is a loud, dissenting voice, evidenced in his homoerotic magnum opus from which the book draws its name. Quieter, in this fictional world, is the voice of Ascher's widow Martha, who, years after her husband's death, begins to parse through the diaries he left behind. Between a few innocuous-looking pages lies the Pandora's box at the heart of this story, one that forces Martha to question the realities of marriage, motherhood and self.
Mark Merlis (Man About Town), whose previous novels have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award, dissects the Ascher family with surgical precision, peeling back the couple's facades to reveal two people struggling against unmet expectations both internal and social. In his diaries, Jonathan expounds on the seedy bathhouses and late-night trysts that were two of the few options for a gay man in midcentury New York City, while Martha remembers a life that pivoted on her husband's choices, suffocating in its narrowness.
JD's most masterful element is its treatment of these two characters, both of whom spent their lives groping for contentment like one trying to find a light switch in a darkened room. A great writer offers not just tight prose but also insight, a series of probing questions that extend from the fictional world into the real one. JD asks who its characters were, and in doing so, forces the reader to confront the intricate and fascinating politics of identity. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer