Stephen Greco's Now and Yesterday

You know Stephen Greco as a journalist and an administrator of the Ferro-Grumley, and today he releases his sweeping literary novel about longtime gay friends in Brooklyn, Now and Yesterday [and Kindle]. Ed White says it's "an often poignant, and sometimes chilling, romance of the creative class," and Kirkus writes

"Greco slides a slice of American gay culture under the literary microscope. Peter and Harold settled in Brooklyn in the 1970s, committed lovers, one with journalism ambitions, the other a poet. Then Harold died during the early days of the AIDS crisis. Peter forgot poetry and built a boutique ad agency, now gobbled up by a conglomerate, where he peddled "goods and services for a brave new world in which more people needed more things." With but one serious relationship post-Harold, Peter lives at the edge of loneliness. Greco believably sketches New York's gay culture—the right parties, the right place for clothing, and who's shtupping whom—while watching Peter redefine himself. Peter laments and dithers and becomes almost a less-interesting character than his friend Jonathan, a celebrated documentary filmmaker dying of prostate cancer. Greco delves artfully into Peter's stumbling friendship-turned-romance with Will, a young California writer seeking prestige bylines, and lays it against his refusal to take up with rent boys. A second narrative thread places Peter at a moral crossroads when his corporate bosses demand he cook up a campaign for a Glenn Beck-like demagogue. With his gift for observation and turns of phrase—"the remains of an intellectual enshrined in the urn of a glamorous career"—Greco offers a book about big ideas rather than action: ideas about gay life; about the depths and importance of friendship; about money and power; about the need for love and sex; and about a man's moral relationship to who he is and what he does. Greco has written a life-affirming yet melancholy, John O'Hara-like analysis of post-baby-boom-meets-millennial-queer Big Apple society."

Greco's previous books include The Sperm Engine and Dreadnought.

Comments

[Chris]

Thanks for introducing me to this book. I never would have found it without your post. I am about a quarter of the way through and loving it!