Jeremy Thrane - Hardcover

Christensen, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767908015 ISBN 13: 9780767908016

Publisher: Broadway, 2001

Synopsis

From the author of the highly acclaimed In the Drink, a smart and sexy exploration of New York and its customs through the eyes of a disillusioned, yet secretly hopeful, gay man.

Jeremy Thrane is a thirty-five-year-old writer in love with a married man. For years, Jeremy has posed as "archivist" to Ted Masterson, a Hollywood action star. Jeremy maintains Ted's New York brownstone and guards the secret that could destroy his career. But when Ted and his movie-star wife, Giselle, adopt a child and become America's most-photographed family, Jeremy finds himself without a job and, more importantly, bereft of the love of his life.

With the same wit and authenticity that have made her a critical and popular favorite, Kate Christensen chronicles Jeremy's search for a new start as he ventures to every corner of the New York landscape, from watering holes where gossip columnists await an "item" to dives where waiters and busboys are eager to please patrons–especially after their shifts are over. In his spare time, he struggles to finish a novel based on his father's peripatetic life as a fanatical Marxist and turns out sizzling pornography for a one-man enterprise run by an old high school acquaintance. His sister, an up-and-coming rock musician, and his thrice-married, former flower-child mother, who found her true calling as a poet late in life, provide the mixture of criticism and compassion Jeremy has known all his life and now, for the most unexpected reasons, finally learns to appreciate.

A fast-paced and funny social satire, Jeremy Thrane deftly captures the slippery chameleon quality of American identity, the power of youth and beauty, and the complexity of love.

About this title

Review:

With this portrait of a closeted gay movie star's live-in lover, Jeremy Thrane ventures into a largely unexplored subcontinent of literature: the lives and times of hangers-on. Jeremy is 35, unemployed, working on novel, and living in a fabulous townhouse in Gramercy Park. For his entire adult life, he has been discreetly provided for by Ted Masterson, an action-movie star married to an equally famous actress. The novel hinges on a question best phrased metaphorically: What happens when Kato gets booted from the guesthouse? In the opening pages, Ted throws his sexual sidekick out on his ear, and Jeremy finds himself in the unenviable position of learning to create a life in his mid-30s. (It's sort of like a gender-swapping version of those novels, epidemic in the 1970s, about unfulfilled wives who head off to find themselves.)

Jeremy realizes he hasn't really noticed the passing of time, and discovers to his shock that he's not the boy he used to be: "Now, on what I was dismayed to learn was the cusp of early middle age, my hair was graying just a little at the temples, my muscles were softening somewhat, and my whole body had widened slightly, had taken on a new maturity that I didn't entirely dislike, but wasn't thrilled with either, because who would be?" The novel follows Jeremy's gentle adventures as he looks for love, an apartment, a job, and a little companionship. This is a grungy, funny Manhattan fable of walk-ups and poisonous ambitions, of family ties and two-faced friends. Kate Christensen brings to Jeremy's story the same mordant wit and social satire that made her first novel, In the Drink, a cult favorite. This one reads like a roman à clef, but probably isn't, which is a compliment to the novel's comical and uncanny verisimilitude. --Claire Dederer

From the Back Cover:

"Years from now, readers will speak of Kate Christensen’s New York the way they speak of Joyce’s Dublin or Dickens’s London. Jeremy Thrane is a warm-blooded, clear-eyed portrait of a great city at the turn of the millenium, evoked through vivid characters, robust prose, and a confident eroticism. Best of all is Jeremy Thrane himself, old enough to know better, but young enough to keep trying, one of the most engaging narrators in recent memory. He is alternately witty and lyrical, judgmental and compassionate, smart-mouthed, and tender; a real, complicated guy, in other words. This lovely book could not ask for a better narrator, and New York could not ask for a better elegist that Kate Christensen."
--James Hynes, author of The Lecturer’s Tale and Publish and Perish

"Everybody knows a Jeremy Thrane, but only Kate Christensen has the explosive talent to put his hilarious, wry voice into a sparkling, witty, and smart prose that surprises on every page."
--Jenny McPhee, author of The Center of Things

"Like a latter-day Evelyn Waugh, Kate Christensen skewers the landscape of today’s New York City in her new novel, Jeremy Thrane, eviscerating gays and straights; movie stars, models, musicians, and artists; hangers-on and wannabes, all with equal opportunity strokes. Yet beneath the book’s sharp satiric surface lies a depth of compassion that raises it far above most contemporary novels. Christensen’s is an astonishing voice."
--Henry Flesh, Lambda Literary Award—winning author of Michael and Massage

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0767908015
• ISBN 13: 9780767908016
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320