Nova Scotia House

Curator and fashion critic Porter (What Artists Wear) turns to fiction with a melancholy love story about two generations of gay men. Twenty-four years after the death of Johnny Grant’s lover, the artist Jerry Field, from AIDS, Johnny is still unable to move forward. He aimlessly wanders the same London streets and lives in the same public housing flat, chasing intimacy in a string of meaningless hookups, and his stream of consciousness narration flows back to his student years in 1990s London, when, at 19, he met Jerry, then 45. Their 16 months together were “everything” to Johnny. Now that Johnny has reached Jerry’s age when Jerry died, his memories of the pair’s loving relationship and Jerry’s decline feel particularly poignant. Driving the narrative is Johnny’s need to find closure by recognizing the depth of devastation wrought by AIDS, which culminates with his visit to the U.K. AIDS Memorial Quilt. Porter effectively renders his protagonist’s slow progress in stylized prose, reflecting the cyclical rhythms of Johnny’s thoughts and patterns (“The quilt is on display again it’s the second time they’ve put it on display since they got it out of storage the first time I couldn’t go I just couldn’t go”). It’s a moving story of a man’s reckoning with an impossible grief. (Oct.)