NancyKay Shapiro

I thoroughly enjoyed this wholly adult love story about two very different, very damaged men set against the backdrop of contemporary New York City. Compared to so many modern love stories (gay or straight), this novel strikes me as very realistic and grown up. Too often writers become so enamoured of their characters that they tend to shy away from showing them as whole people with human imperfections and/or they seem to graft slapdash, quickie happy endings onto otherwise complicated, difficult tales. Shapiro, however, exhibits uncommon bravery to allow her protagonists, forty something ad exec Jim Glaser and his twenty-three year old artist lover Seth McKenna, to be deeply, believably flawed. Don't get me wrong - both men are still extremely likeable, perhaps more so because they come across as so real. And the ending is realistically, but hopefully, ambiguous.

Jim is still mourning the unexpected and senseless loss of his longtime lover when he meets Seth at a photo shoot. Tentatively the men begin a platonic relationship. As their feelings for one another heat up, the older man nervously delays taking the sexual plunge such that the tension between them is excruciating (for both the characters and the readers) by the time they finally do fall into bed. This proves a refreshing change of pace from so much gay fiction where the order of events tends to be - sex first, relationship later. But when Jim and Seth do consummate, the sex scenes are intensely passionate and more than a little pornographic. Hot stuff indeed. But what starts off wondrously soon sours when the secret past that Seth so meticulously hid from Jim comes back to haunt him. What Seth viewed as self-reinvention, Jim interprets as deceit. The crisis is brought to a head during a trip back to Seth's hometown in Drinkwater, Nebraska.

It is in Drinkwater that I find this otherwise perfect book's only true shortcoming. I felt Shapiro, a born and bred city gal, painted most of the rural characters as broad stereotypes of ignorance and evil. It would have leant the book more gravity, and certainly been more believable, if the reader had been given more of a balanced view, perhaps even a glimpse into the motivations behind their behaviours.

But this is a quibble. WHAT LOVE MEANS TO YOU PEOPLE is an amazing achievement. I recommend this to readers of LGBT fiction (and fans of the Big Apple) who seek an emotionally engaging, slightly spicy, uncommonly realistic love story.… (más)