Title: The Lost Language of Cranes Author: David Leavitt Published by: Knopf, 1986 ISBN: 0-394-53873-0 [hard cover, 319 pages]
Rose and Owen Benjamin are living quietly and uneventfully in the midst of New York City's frenetic energy. For both of them, their marriage and their homely midtown apartment is a refuge from self-doubts that they have kept at bay for twenty-five years. Rose is a copy editor for a small publishing house; her well-ordered existence belies a real hunger for the passion that she knows is absent from her life. Owen, once a promising academic, has settled into a lackluster but respectable job as director of admissions at a private boys' school, a position that is profoundly contradicted by a singular, utterly clandestine routine: he spends his Sunday afternoons in a gay pornographic movie theatre in the grip of an unbearable obsession.Their only son, Philip, has come of age in a more tolerant time and place. On the edge of reluctant manhood, he has fallen in love with Eliot, who has brought him out of his prolonged, painful adolescence into what seems to Philip an enthrallingly sophisticated homosexual milieu. Raised in a literary and bohemian world by two gay men (the very antithesis of Philip's childhood), Eliot is a dashing figure in the downtown Manhattan club scene. Amazed to be part of this world, Philip is suddenly sure of one thing: it is time to tell his parents who he is and how he lives. Though he knows the revelation will upset the balance of their lives, he has no idea just how fragile that balance really is.
Ironic, unsparing, heartfelt, this is a novel about parents and children trying to face each other in extraordinary circumstances that have shattered all their comforting familial assumptions about each other: a son who wants only and earnestly to be allowed to live openly as he desires to, a father who sees in his son someone who is living as he himself desperately longs to, and a mother who comes to feel that her life has been little more than a cruel joke.
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