Synopsis
In 1878, young Satterwhite attend Yale University in the hope he will discover what life holds for fellow of such aesthetic senses. He is unprepared to meet his assigned art teacher, professor Doriskos Klionarios. The pair are so dissimilar: young and old, the youngest apple from a grand old tree of progenitors and a foreigner who will never be fine Englishman. But the tumultuous love affair scorned by their society is a gilded construct between one believing himself ready to know real love and a willing partner who understands that what the heart sees it cannot forget; better to acquiesce to desire. And so the pale Satterwhite and the bristled Greek professor abandon Yale University during the 1880s, and find themselves fleeing those who would deny true love as the travel to rural West Virginia and finally, to the haunts of the jaded British aristocracy.
From Booklist
If a novel's worth can be measured by the power and verity of the emotions it instills in the reader, then Argiri's approaches the divine. It transforms and moves the spirit as modern fiction should and so seldom does, describing a love story with such true emotion the heart aches reading it. The God in Flight portrays an illicit relationship between two men--a young Greek professor and his student--who meet at Yale University in the 1880s. Their intense passion for each other within the stifling confines of late-ninteenth-century society is the actual beginning and end of the story. In between, these demigods seduce from us our own surprising response to their love. Simion Satterwhite and Doriskos Klinarios are serious souls with brilliant minds and highly cultivated sensibilities, both survivors of damaging childhoods. The isolation of their lives, as two halves of the same heart, leads to their fateful meeting at Yale. Once they discover each other, they are forced into a life of duplicity, risking all to remain together. The essence of their story, an eternal fidelity to the pure devotion they share, shimmers just below the surface of a plot that, in true Victorian fashion, runs readers through the mill with worry over spiritual perils, near detection, and illnesses that could be treated only with laudanum and weeks of bed rest. But Argiri's commanding descriptive powers transfigure the lush nineteenth-century romantic conventions to make these heroic lovers impossible to resist. Along with the rest of the male protagonists, they drop ancient mythological references and exude the classics erudition that was a masculine privilege of the time. Women figure hardly at all, yet their absence forces a fresh look at the socialization of love and how deeply its elements are embedded within the psyches of both sexes. Deanna Larson-Whiterod
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