Anachronisms come in many forms, but high on the list are chance encounters with a former lover one is not entirely sure one wants to see again. Or is that just serendipity in a different costume? Those questions, and the memories that go along with them, are at the heart of Bright Monday, an introspective and satisfyingly wistful novel by David Leavitt (Shelter in Place), one of the U.S.'s literary trailblazers in both queer-themed fiction and astute, perceptive depictions of family life.
In 2022, Adam, this fine novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, is a writer who has traveled to Milan from New York for a three-month sabbatical. His original plan was to stay home with his husband, Robert, and work on his writing. Instead, his friend Valeria coaxed him to come to Italy and translate her latest novel. Unlike its predecessors, she wrote this one under a pseudonym, and it was a huge commercial success. On Easter Sunday, two days before he is to return to New York, Adam goes for a walk in a dog park and receives a shock when he sees Francesco, his former lover from 32 years earlier. Francesco invites Adam to lunch at his home but first calls his wife, Natalia, who was Francesco's girlfriend all those years ago, to ask if it's okay. Adam is surprised when she says yes, given that, back then, she "had told [him], without compunction, that introducing [him] to Francesco was the biggest mistake she had ever made." Accepting Francesco's invitation may also prove to be a mistake: in the elevator of his apartment building, Francesco pulls Adam into a passionate kiss.
The novel's long middle section is an extended flashback that takes readers to the New York of 1989, when Adam, who worked in a bookstore, met many visiting Italians through his gay friend Emilio, the New York correspondent for an Italian newspaper. Adam had an immediate attraction to Francesco, a Columbia student who told him that, while he had slept with a number of women, "On the Kinsey scale, I'm probably a seven." What follows is a highly intellectual and deeply felt novel about passion and betrayal, ambition and longing, recriminations and forgiveness, all of it at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Like the gray skies in the beloved Yasujirō Ozu films Adam frequently cites, a mood of melancholy blankets this thoughtful and rewarding work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: David Leavitt's Bright Monday is a melancholy novel about a gay American writer's chance encounter with a former lover in Milan, a meeting that resurrects feelings of longing, passion, and betrayal.