num_pages: 319
description: Two years after his first collection of stories, Family Dancing, was welcomed with extraordinary international acclaim, David Leavitt has written a remarkable first novel about a complex family and a marriage suddenly imperilled by the revelation of long-kept secrets.Rose and Owen Benjamin are living quietly and uneventfully in the midst of New York City’s frenetic energy. For both of them, their marriage and their homely midtown apartment is a refuse from self-doubts that they have kept at bay for twenty-five years. Rose is a copy editor for a small publishing house; her well-ordered existence belies a real hunger for the passion that she knows is absent from her life. Owen, once a promising academic, has settle into a lackluster but respectable job as director of admissions at a private boys’ school, a position that is profoundly contradicted by a singular, utterly clandestine routine: he spends his Sunday afternoons in gay pornographic movie theatres in the grip of an unbearable obsession.Their only son , Philip, has come of age in a more tolerant time and place. On the edge of reluctant manhood, he has fallen in love with Eliot, who has brought him out of his prolonged, painful adolescence into what seems to Philip an enthralling sophisticated homosexual milieu. Raised in a literary and bohemian world by two gay men (the very antithesis of Philip’s childhood), Eliot is a dashing figure in the downtown Manhattan club scene. Amazed to be part of this world, Philip is suddenly sure of one thing: it is time to tell his parents of who he is and how he lives. Though he knows the revelation will upset the balance of their lives, he has no idea just how fragile that balance really is.Ironic, unsparing, heartfelt, this is a novel about parents and children trying to face each other in the extraordinary circumstances that have shattered all their comforting familial assumptions about each other: a son who wants only and earnestly to be allowed to live openly as he desires to, a father who sees in his someone who is living the life as he himself desperately longs to, and a mother who comes to feel that her life has been little more than a cruel joke.With what The New York Times calls his “genius for empathy.” David Leavitt shows us in his deeply affecting articulation of these three lives how trammelled we are by what we do not know about each other, and at what price we live with knowing too much.
language: English
title: The Lost Language of Cranes
titlecomplete: The Lost Language of Cranes
characters: Rose Benjamin, Philip Benjamin, Owen Benjamin
genres: LGBT, Gay, Gay Fiction, The United States Of America, Novels, Romance, Literature, Contemporary, Fiction, Queer
ratings_count: 6542
places: New York City, New York
publisher: Knopf