Haslett\u2019s third novel is partly narrated by Peter Fischer, a New York City lawyer working for a nonprofit handling asylum cases. There, and in the rest of his life, he handles things with assurance but little joy\u2014his lover, Cliff, has little more depth than a dating-app hookup, and he avoids conversations with his snarky and unfiltered sister, Liz. But he\u2019s unsettled when he takes on the case of Vasel Marku, a young gay Albanian man seeking asylum over fears he\u2019ll face homophobic persecution. Peter\u2019s narration of his unusually deep involvement in Vasel\u2019s case is braided around third-person narration about his mother, Ann, who leads a women-focused spiritual retreat in Vermont with her partner, Clare. Ann\u2019s breakup with her husband (and Peter\u2019s father) after falling for Clare disrupted her life, and it\u2019s clear that both mother and son have been swallowing a lot of unspoken hurt. The strength of Haslett\u2019s storytelling is its deliberation, slowly peeling back the veneers of Peter’s and Ann\u2019s professional accomplishments and cool public personas to reveal storms of guilt and fear. The two share complex queer sexual coming-of-age stories\u2014Peter as a teenager falling for a handsome and emotionally distant classmate, Ann as a middle-aged woman falling for a woman, shipwrecking her marriage and career as a pastor. They share losses, too\u2014Peter\u2019s father\u2019s death from cancer and a withheld event that gives the novel its emotional payoff. It\u2019s \u201cpractically mandatory,\u201d Clare observes, for women to \u201chide in other people\u2019s pain,\u201d just as men like Peter are asked to never feel it. And though the outlines of the novel suggest sentimental family-trauma fare, Haslett\u2019s sophisticated grasp of the ways that people over-police their feelings makes it a remarkably acute and effective character study.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Haslett\u2019s third novel is partly narrated by Peter Fischer, a New York City lawyer working for a nonprofit handling asylum cases. There, and in the rest of his life, he handles things with assurance but little joy\u2014his lover, Cliff, has little more depth than a dating-app hookup, and he avoids conversations with his snarky and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}