Fall Love by Anne Whitehouse
Fall Love tells the intertwined stories of four twenties-something artists and professionals adrift in the bad old pre-AIDS New York of 1980. From a summer of love through an autumn of deceit and regret, we follow the lives of Althea, Jeanne, Paul, and Bryce from self-sacrifice to self-knowledge. We watch them as they travel in and out of the city, to Block Island, Connecticut, Mississippi, and Florida. Within the city, we are taken through public schools in Harlem and the far-flung reaches of the Bronx and Brooklyn. We learn about modern dance and theater companies in downtown Manhattan, and experience the contrasts of a life in a penthouse and a studio apartment.
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"In the novel, Whitehouse sets up a classic scenario of the travail of a fledgling artist who seeks a critique of his work in a new form by his peers... Her poetic handling of language and of sensuous detail is superb: in her descriptions, especially, of the intimacies of lovemaking, she is at the same time graphic and subtle, provocative and sensitive; in her portrayal of the unspoken emotions - about death and its aftermath, of fear, of pride, and of hurt - she conveys powerfully the cruel effects of all those coincidences of life."
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