num_pages: 288
description: Joel Lingeman has it all: an overpaid sinecure advising Congress, a fifteen-year partnership with a perfectly adequate lover, a cozy circle of drinking buddies. Until one day his world implodes. His lover runs off, working for Congress threatens to turn him into a felon, and Joel is hurled back, out of condition, into the dating game he couldn't manage twenty years earlier.Amid the rubble he finds himself clinging to an image from his boyhood: a model in a swimsuit ad, buried in the back of a magazine, who had beckoned to young Joel to step through the page and into another life. Aided by a detective who is more elusive than his quarry, Joel sets out to discover the real person he knows only from a fading photograph. What begins as a quest for an idyll in the New Mexico hills ends in New Jersey, where a rundown split-level turns out to be a shrine to everyday heroism and ordinary happiness.Joel's journey -- touching, comic, and deftly observed -- overlays a whip-smart critique of the cynicism and buffoonery of Capitol Hill and a gently acerbicaccount of how people break up and how they get together. Mark Merlis's third novel contains an unforgettable new twist on the idea that the personal is political: clever, wry, and knowing, it's a wise novel that unashamedly celebrates romance, nostalgia, and innocence.
language: English
title: Man About Town
titlecomplete: Man About Town
genres: Fiction, M M Romance, Gay, Gay Fiction, LGBT
ratings_count: 157
publisher: Harper