1: THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT
PAUL MCCONNELL must learn to love and embrace his authentic self, even at the cost of outward approval, acclamation, and success. Even at the cost of the thing he fears most: social death.
2: THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT
The primary antagonistic force in the novel is the homophobia and societal disapproval towards gays (especially in the novel's historical context of the 1970s–1990s) which PAUL observes, thereby creating self-loathing within himself.
This force is represented by a number of specific characters within the novel, in ways both big and small:
SUSAN, WARREN, and TONY, friends of PAUL's from childhood whose displays of homophobia are absorbed by PAUL and briefly mentioned through backstory. Similarly, through explicit gay slurs and hostility uttered and exhibited by ZANDER and TRIP, secondary characters whom PAUL interacts with at several key points throughout the novel. These examples stem less from animus than from an absorption of the mores of the world around them.
More critically, as displayed by the significant ambivalence and disapproval by ELIZABETH, PAUL's eventual mother-in-law, towards her son (and PAUL's lover), JAMES FIELD, in light of his own homosexuality. This disapproval is a combination of genuine (albeit misguided) concern for her son's wellbeing, as well as her own preoccupation with societal approval and the implications for her social standing should the world learn she has a gay son.
3: CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE
ACTS OF CONTRITION (strong preference; narratively significant)
BAD BODY LANGUAGE
THIS AMERICAN LIE
4: DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES
IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn
Like IN MEMORIAM, a gay love story set against the backdrop of war and English boarding schools, and with a tone that moves between the lyrical and the brutal, my novel shares a concern with the way in which same-sex desire can be both clarified and distorted under pressure. Instead of early 20th-century boarding schools and trench war, though, it’s the late-20th-century Ivy League, the culture wars, and American political life that form the crucible. Both novels explore how young men carry private truths through public cataclysms.
THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai
Much like THE GREAT BELIEVERS, my novel partially utilizes a dual-timeline structure to explore the long emotional and social fallout of the 1970s and 1980s, including the AIDS crisis. Both books center gay characters reckoning with memory, loss, and the compromises of survival; both also scrutinize the ways in which history gets remembered—or rewritten. Where THE GREAT BELIEVERS foregrounds community grief and artistic legacy, my novel is simultaneously more narrowly focused on a single man’s reckoning with personal guilt, ambition, and complicity, yet also broader in its political lens and commentary about the state of the nation in the present told via a story set in the past.
5: CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT
After a night at Studio 54 awakens a repressed desire that dare not speak its name, an ambitious outsider becomes entangled with a family of American aristocrats, a connection that will span decades and generations and ultimately force him to question: How much of himself is he willing to sacrifice on the altar of success?
6: OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS
Internal conflict:
Several months after arriving in the strange, rarefied world of the elite, as epitomized by Princeton campus, PAUL continues to feel himself inexorably pulled towards JAMES. The sight alone of him brings joy to PAUL's heart; his absence turmoil. The sound of his voice turns PAUL's skin to gooseflesh.
Surely JAMES's social standing, his money and his power and his understanding of the codes of high society, have something to do with it. But deep inside, PAUL knows his attraction to JAMES is spurred by something more than his desire simply to advance. Does he have the courage to open the door that will reveal why? To finally confront what lies behind?
A scene that triggers the protagonist:
Fresh off an emotional phone call with his father in distant Ohio, alone on Princeton campus on Thanksgiving of 1978 and too broke to travel, PAUL receives an unexpected phone call from JAMES, up in New York City. “Thanksgiving's my favorite weekend in the city,” JAMES tells him. “All the squares leave town, no one left but miscreants and deviants.” JAMES issues an invitation: Would PAUL like to join him? After all, he does have a rather large suite at the Plaza. “You could sleep on the couch,” JAMES adds tentatively.
What to do? To leave the safe cocoon of his dorm at Princeton feels like a gigantic error. Except that to stay would be an even bigger mistake.
Secondary conflict:
Decades after his love affair with JAMES, PAUL is married to JAMES's twin sister, KATHERINE, enjoying a life characterized by all the extrinsic trapping of success: a connection to a prominent family solidified through marriage; a massive estate. The only question that remains is that of his career—specifically, his chosen profession of architect, a lower-paid, lower-status occupation as compared to, say, high finance. A choice is offered: How would he feel about a job at KATHERINE's family's brokerage firm? Never mind his utter lack of genuine passion for it.
It turns out to be no choice at all. PAUL takes the job.
7: THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING
The Field family estate on the Philadelphia Main Line unfurls like the kind of place PAUL would have only dreamt of. Except it would’ve never occurred to him to dream on such a scale.
Six hundred acres of rolling hills, ancient trees, and stone outbuildings that predate the Revolutionary War. The house itself—“the big house,” as JAMES calls it—is a colossal Georgian Revival pile of red brick at least one hundred and fifty feet across, with everything in splendid symmetry, especially the windows. Four, five, six, eight, twelve, twenty … on his first of many visits across the decades, PAUL loses count of the number.
Beauty is laced with tension, the estate's splendor masking decay—emotional, moral, even structural—and it functions as a kind of gilded cage. In summertime, when it’s theirs alone, the estate becomes a private planet for PAUL and JAMES. A place of sensual awakening, disco music, and skinny-dipping in secluded ponds. In winter, under the family’s watchful eye, it’s the site of elaborate rituals of control and appearance: Christmas Eve services, formal dinners with genteel neighbors. In these settings, the price of admission is silence, assimilation, and self-abnegation.
Scene by scene, year by year, the estate is not just a backdrop but a stage for class performance and the repression of same-sex desire, its beauty inseparable from its menace. A place PAUL can never fully stand to be but, even more, can’t bear to leave.
