Review: Forever Man by A.J. DeWall
Forever Man by A.J. DeWall (August 4, 2014); 312 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.
“It’s supposed to turn your life upside down. That’s the point,” one of the characters from Forever Man says of love.
When Ren is miserably stuck in Santa Fe, working on the home of one of his most annoying interior design clients, he runs into his best friend from his youth, Cole, who happens to be in town recording a song with Alegra, the world-famous singer for whom Cole produces and sometimes plays the guitar. After that first meeting, they discover how right that statement is when both of their lives are tumbled into chaos.
There had always been unacknowledged feelings between Cole and Ren in their youth, their past steeped in pining. When they meet up again, those feelings still murmur under the surface of their friendship, even though Cole has a boyfriend and Ren has a very well-known fiancé who’s been very publicly instrumental in the fight for federal marriage rights for gay couples in the U.S. So, when the pent-up gets un-pent and the apple cart gets upset by the acknowledgment of old feelings, those apples go everywhere and make a big mess.
What happens when you finally get what you want, but you don’t get it when you want it? When getting what you want means upsetting everything you’ve managed to find in the meantime?
“Do you need something?” It’s the refrain that Ren hears throughout the novel, the question that aches in the back of his head even as he tries to remain true to the promises he’s already made to so many people.
Real love is pretty inconvenient and rarely not messy. As it should be, it’s pretty painful, inconvenient and messy in this novel, but it’s also fulfilling and joyous and really satisfying to read about. The backdrop of Santa Fe isn’t mystified, but allowed to be strange and beautiful and to pull lovers together and apart. The place itself is a character in this story.
Aside from the concerns of the two men at this novel’s center, the story is generous enough to pull in the stories of Deidre (Ren’s brash, sometimes selfish but still redeemable design client), Paul (Ren’s politically-driven fiancé), Antonio (Ren’s soulful local assistant), Sarah (Antonio’s wife, who works with homeless LGBTQ youth at Alex Marin House), the kids of Alex Marin House (young and homeless and queer and looking for signs of their own reality), and even the famous singer Alegra (who’s a bit saucy and intensely invested in Cole’s happiness).
I really got invested in these people—even Deidre got my empathy on occasion—and was so wound into the story that I read the book almost straight through in one sitting (okay, two). The mystery here isn’t whether Cole and Ren belong together, but how they’ll get there.
All of the characters in the novel have a stake in the reunion of Ren and Cole, which makes this a story about so much more than simply loving someone, or throwing down for some good sex (and oh, my, I may have had several premature hot flashes reading parts of this book!). There is so much to upset here when lives go sideways. The entire marriage-equality community seems to need Ren and his fiancé Paul to remain picture-perfect; the homeless queer kids of Alex Marin House look up to Cole and Ren; Alegra wants to be a fairy godmother to Cole; Deidre is jaded but looking for a way not to be, and to be a friend to Ren. Well-intentioned or not, innocent or not, every move one character makes impacts other characters in a deep way, as if everyone is tied together by invisible thread. In part, this is the concern of this story: how all our lives, every action, every feeling, makes waves of impact on the world and the people around us. None of us is ever alone, and everything matters.
