Half-Life: A Novel Book

This deceptively amiable first novel tells the sometimes dark, affecting story of a gay teenager's last weeks of high school in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles. To his credit, author Aaron Krach avoids all the pitfalls of the typical gay youth novel; his Adam is already happily aware and accepting of his homosexuality and does not, during the course of the story, actually come out to anyone who does not already know. Instead, Krach casts a wider net, exploring Adam's complicated relationships with family, friends and, ultimately, his lover, to speak of the fundamental need for human connection.

Eighteen year old Adam Westman is a child of divorce. He and his world weary eleven year old sister, Sandra, live with their father, a school teacher who has suffered from severe depression all his life, almost to the point of being non-functional. Both children are somewhat estranged from their mother, who has remarried and is obsessively involved in her work running a successful film production company. It's not surprising then that Adam has grown up self-reliant and cynical. But fairly early in the story, a rather shocking tragedy forces the family, as well as several of Adam's high school friends and a dashing local police officer, into unexplored, alien, sometimes uneasy relationships with one another.

There is much to recommend Half Life. Without exception, the characters are well defined and mostly quite engaging. The storyline, of a dysfunctional family pulling together and re-defining itself in a time of grief (also explored in Trebor Healey's lovely Through It Came Bright Colors), is given enough breathing room to develop quite organically and believably. The love story, between Adam and Jeff, the thirty eight year old cop whom he meets under unfortunate circumstances, also plays out deliciously slowly. Unfortunately, the book's simple, poignant moments are offset by way too much extraneous dialogue (of the snappy, snarky variety) that slows down the forward motion of the story, not to mention making the book's gay characters (Jeff, Adam and his schoolmates Dart, Fran and Veronica) occasionally appear to be self-consciously glib and shallow. Plus, Krach portrays his only two straight adult female characters, Adam's mother Vivian, and Jeff's partner Sue, as outdated, vaguely offensive, stereotypes - the cold, de-feminised businesswoman and the desperate, calorie obsessed faghag, respectively.

But all in all, I found Half Life to be very enjoyable, as it offers an emotionally resonant, stylish alternative to the glut of LGBT coming out novels on the market, to say nothing of its odd, but strangely moving Raymond Carver-esque epilogue.