The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

Friday, Dec. 16, 2022--San Antonio

The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela was shortlisted for the National Book Award and named on a number of lists of top books of 2022.  It's the story of a 37-year-old gay man, Andres, who is a university professor and has returned to from the West Coast to his suburban hometown on Long Island to assist his mother in taking care of his father during a time of illness.  The trip just happens to coincide with the 20th reunion of his Catholic school graduating class.  This gives him a chance to remember what it was like living in this suburban town as in one of the few minority migrant families and the relationships he built with their children.  He also reconnects with his best female friend whose parents are also professors and who happens to miss the reunion because she has been committed to a mental hospital after having gone off her medications for schizophrenia and also with his first love who is now married with children.  Although Andres has been married for some time to a medical doctor of Dominican descent, this trip coincides with his husband having traveled to Africa on a professional trip, so he is able to remain in Babylon for a few weeks.  The book covers many topics:  the need for minorities to be careful at all times and to always perform better than others, the problems minorities have with the police, maintaining fidelity in a marriage, the effects of jealousy between siblings, the question of whether and when to have children, the experience of "coming out," the difficulties of being a liberal within a mostly conservative community, etc.  The book includes the back stories of Andre's parents, his brother and his life, a classmate who was his nemesis and bragged about bashing a queer man in high school and is now an evangelical minister, his best friend Simone (in the mental hospital) and her family, and his first love and his family, so it is not just the life story of this one young man.  But when Andre is telling his own story in the first person, it is quite enjoyably humorous at times making the book come more alive.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.