Midnight at the Cinema Palace
A Novel
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- $299.00
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- $299.00
Descripción editorial
This tender, exuberant novel about a young man navigating coming of age in ’90s San Francisco is for readers of Garth Greenwell and André Aciman.
Walter Simmering is searching for love and purpose in a city he doesn’t realize is fading away—San Francisco in 1993, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the dawn of the tech revolution. Out of college, out of the closet, and transplanted from the Midwest, Walter is irresistibly drawn from his shell when he meets Cary Menuhin and Sasha Stravinsky, a dynamic couple who live blithely beyond the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Witty and ultra-stylish, Cary and Sasha seem to have stepped straight out of a sultry film noir, captivating Walter through a shared obsession with cinema and Hollywood’s golden age.
As the three embark on adventures across the city, filled with joie de vivre, their lively friendship evolves in unexpected ways. When Walter befriends Lawrence, a filmmaker and former child actor living with HIV, they pursue a film project of their own, with hilarious and tragic results.
Midnight at the Cinema Palace is a vibrant and nostalgic exploration of young souls discovering themselves amidst the backdrop of a disappearing city. Christopher Tradowsky’s astonishing debut captures the essence of ’90s queer culture and the complex lives of friends seeking an aesthetically beautiful and fulfilling way of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tradowsky's accomplished debut follows 23-year-old "cute shy gay boy" Walter Simmering's misadventures in love and cinema in 1990s San Francisco. Walter's consciousness is suffused with classic films, as referenced in each of the chapter titles ("Breathless," "Vertigo," etc.). After he spies a "gamine" named Sasha and chases him into Macy's, Walter becomes enraptured by Sasha and his partner, Cary ("This dandyish woman and lovely man... he never met anyone like either of them"). Walter and Cary quickly bond by working on a noir screenplay together (excerpts of which appear throughout the book), and the more time Walter spends with her, the more he wonders, "did I want to be Cary and get to kiss Sasha, or did I want to be Sasha and get to kiss Cary." The three eventually form a throuple, "as if Walter had been the missing piece all along." Tradowsky thrills in his freewheeling exploration of the characters' gender and sexuality and their tumultuous attraction to each other, which builds to a breaking point during a climactic road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway. Though he overstuffs the narrative with a few too many preciously quirky episodes, Tradowsky's film references are as finely tuned as his observations about relationships. Queer cinephiles will be especially enthralled.
