You know you’re old when a decade you consider the recent past is the historical setting of a new novel. That’s the reality check I received while reading “Four Squares,” the heartfelt and entertaining second novel by Bobby Finger, the co-host of the celebrity news podcast “Who? Weekly.”
It’s 1992, and Artie Anderson is in his West Village apartment, baking a cake for his 30th birthday. Artie moved to New York six years earlier to become a writer, and find sex and love somewhere more open to queerness than his “tense and silent home” in Ohio. What he found was a gay community shattered by AIDS and his creative ambitions derailed by work at an ad agency. Shy and fearful of contracting H.I.V., he has been “worrying himself out of 90 percent of his desires and regretting it 100 percent of the time.”
His triumph has been finding a new, chosen family in his best friends, Kim, Waylon and Adam. The four gossip, attend political protests and make regular trips to Julius’, the Greenwich Village gay bar now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s there that the newly 30 Artie meets Abe, a handsome, closeted bisexual man who will encourage Artie’s artistic aspirations and, ultimately, break his heart.
We next see Artie in 2022, on his 60th birthday, living a different life than the one he was cultivating 30 years earlier as a financially comfortable ghostwriter for celebrity memoirs.
Most unexpectedly, he lives alone, has few friends and has sex “about as frequently as a flu shot.” Shellshocked after losing so many loved ones, to AIDS, auto accidents and unexpected health crises, he centers his social life around Abe’s ex-wife, Vanessa, and their adult daughter, Halle. “You’d think that when they snipped the umbilical cord off me, they just attached it right to you,” Vanessa says of Artie’s attachment to Halle. Over birthday cake, Artie discovers that the two women are moving to Seattle, an abandonment that shakes him into action.
The novel toggles between Artie’s 30s and his 60s, revealing snapshots of Artie’s relationships and career in the ’90s alongside his present explorations of life outside his comfort zone: He reconnects with a queer community at the Gay and Lesbian Seniors (“GALS”) Center, reignites his own writing and even flirts with love.
Thirty years is a lot of time to cover, and at points this scope exacts a price. Some key characters lack the specificity of those in “The Old Place,” Finger’s delightful first novel. And a few relationships at the center of the story — Artie’s bonds with Vanessa and Halle, for example — feel more explained than satisfyingly dramatized. As a result, secrets revealed at the novel’s end don’t land as effectively as they might have.
But Finger’s inviting tone of warmth and decency, his empathy for these people and their world, his bright humor, skillful timing and clever phrasing, carried me along. Of being a ghostwriter, Artie says: “When your job is being anybody, doesn’t that make you a bit of a nobody?”
“Four Squares” pays tribute to the resilience of the gay community in the face of staggering challenges, the vital importance of queer friendships and, as one GALS pal puts it, “the pleasure of finding your people.” This welcome message remains as maddeningly relevant as it was way, way back in the 1990s.
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