User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars.
Zak Salih's upcoming debut novel,
Let's Get Back to the Party , is a thought-provoking and emotionally rich story about two gay men trying to find their place in the world around them.
Oscar and Sebastian were best friends in childhood until Oscar moved away. They haven’t seen each other for years, until Sebastian spots him at a wedding when they’re both 35.
Sebastian, lonely and dealing with the breakup of a relationship, is excited to see Oscar and hopes they may be able to recapture a childhood friendship rich with potential. But Oscar doesn’t want to be reminded of those times, of his vulnerability at a young age.
It’s the weeks after the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, and Oscar feels this is another strike against the gay community. Getting married, having babies, allowing drunk women to overtake gay bars? Is this what we fought for, risked our lives for, homogenization?
Both men are, in their own way, desperate for connection, desperate not to become invisible. Oscar spends his time with anonymous hookups and begins a friendship with a once-famous gay author who is much older than him. Sebastian, a teacher, supervises his school’s LGBTQ group and envies the easy way some students have with accepting and living their truth, something he didn’t have.
While the idea that men “of a certain age” become invisible to the gay community is both cliché and reality, Salih accurately captures the fears, loneliness, and moments of desperate need that many feel from time to time. When all of your friends are getting married and leaving you behind, or if you’re in a place where you really have no friends, what is left for you?
Alternating between memories of childhood and the present,
Let's Get Back to the Party is a beautifully told story that really resonated with me. While I’m not sure I particularly loved either of the characters, I was tremendously invested in their story.
I was fortunate to be on the blog tour for this book. Algonquin Books provided me with a complimentary advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making it available!
Let's Get Back to the Party publishes 2/16.
Check out my list of the best books I read in 2020 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2020.html.
Check out my list of the best books of the last decade at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-favorite-books-of-decade.html.
See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.
Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/.
Rating: really liked it
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU!There are a lot of things to celebrate among queer Americans at the moment. Progress has been made that, when I was a babyqueer, was inconceivable. (And yes, I do know what that word means.) Legal marriage? Common surrogate fatherhood?! Even, in some places, adoption?!? All this presupposes joint mortgages, life insurance left to one's partner, joint bank accounts, Social Security survivor benefits...holy carp, the GOP tomb-raiders who oppose even straight people getting back the money they put into the system must be plotzing. Believe you me, under-40s, not one bit of this was probable in a world with Don't-Ask Don't-Tell witchhunts in all branches of the military and the ever so inaptly named Defense of Marriage Act specifically, and unConstitutionally, forbidding same-sex couples from receiving the 1,049 (by some counts) benefits available to heterosexuals simply by speaking a few words to a County Clerk. (If you're wondering, the religious idiots do not have any thing at all to say about marriage. They can refuse to perform a marriage ceremony for anyone they choose, for any reason they choose; but the State is the only entity that can declare you married, and this has always been so in the United States.)
But what laws give, they can take away; and these rights which are justly ours as much as theirs can, with the wrong (aka right-wing) party at the helm of government, be taken away again by legal chicanery. And Oscar Burnham is bitterly aware of this. Beyond the fact that the extension of legal access to protection for couples strikes at one of the defining qualities of gay-manhood, unbridled and unfettered and unceremonious couple/uncouple relationships where everyone is Mr. Right Now, he's grouchy and squicked out about how the gays are becoming hipsters instead of threatening outsiders to be envied and feared. When he meets Sean, the elderqueer, the survivor of the AIDS years (aka "my direct contemporary") they bond over the Sad State of Things. Sean remembers what it was to be Other with a capital Q when one came out or was outed. Oscar, bless him, tries his damnedest to be there in Sean's head, attaches himself to the older man, becomes his happy shadow.
Sebastian Mote teaches for a living. Sebastian, after re-encountering youthful friend Oscar at a wedding, begins to think...well...sense...maybe perceive will do...that the unfinished business he brings to the table where Oscar's sitting should get more attention from them both. A dance begins, one that ended a decade before; one that wasn't ever resolved, though, so the emotional bonds are still firmly seated. Sebastian's so involved with his students, in the not-squicky way, that he doesn't quite see how Arthur is becoming an obsession...doesn't quite want to let go of his access to the youth's open, happy life awaiting him with boyfriend Raymond.
There is so much about what happens that you'll hate having spoiled. I need you to know, though, one big facet of this story is tragic and painful and life- and generation-defining. It will leave or open wounds for its ferocity and its outrageous reminder that Hate trumps all values thrown in its way because humans love the raw, red, bloody gobbets of The Other's flesh. I don't like that it's true, but nothing in my over-sixty years on Earth has ever come close to persuading me that it isn't.
I am, in a lot of ways, like Oscar: Grumpy, disillusioned by mainstreaming, in a strange, intergenerational love relationship that doesn't look like one anyone outside it understands. (I hope like hell that Rob doesn't feel conflicted about the same things Oscar does!) For that reason, I found this read very much an involving one. The relationship Oscar has with his parents, the emotional ties that bind but are ever looser he feels with Sebastian...all very much like my own life.
What in the end worked best for me about this read was my sense of its reality, its groundedness, and thus it earned my trust. I was always glad to read more and I returned to the read without hesitation. I'm so pleased that the publisher decided to offer me the book to review, and I'm just as pleased that the author wrote such a deeply personal story. The one thing you shouldn't expect is detailed sex scenes, à la Garth Greenwell mentioned in the blurb. It's just not needed to tell this tale the best way it could be told, so Author Salih doesn't do it for the sake of doing it. A big point in his favor.
Then there's the Tragedy I alluded to above, while handled sensitively, isn't so delightful; I wasn't all the way convinced that the event's aftermath was, in fact, not given short shrift. It felt to me as though it was no longer useful in the plot so let's just go now, k? And they did. It wasn't what I felt was enough given the scope of it.
While it did reinforce the solipsism of these men's on-again, off-again intimacy, it felt off, almost reductive, as it's presented in the book. That's a matter of opinion, I know, so take it as such and decide for yourself what you think of the ending.
Now we all have to sit and twiddle our thumbs until Author Salih brings us his next idea. I'm looking forward, and expect you will be too.
Rating: really liked it
Zak Salih, in "Let's Get Back to the Party," reflects on the loneliness - and selfishness - that pops up in contemporary gay life.
Sebastian and Oscar are two very different gay men who share a common childhood, one in which, unknown to both of them, they both wrestled with their queer identities at a time when being queer was socially unacceptable and dangerous. Now, as adults, they both navigate a changing social landscape in which queer people are increasingly present and living "normal" lives. Sebastian wrestles with the freedom he sees in the lives of his queer high school students and finds himself both jealous of and longing for what these liberated students have; Oscar finds himself increasingly angry at a gay world that is being overtaken and normalized by the straights.
Sadly much of Salih's writing is too on the nose and his characters are cliches, constructed to make a number of "points" about the gay community but in such a way that he fails to really capture the nuances of why gay men act the way they do. While the idea of the book is an important one - a reflection on being a middle-aged gay man in a world where gays can live more freely - the execution is lacking. The characters are flat and the plot, and ending, leave much to be desired. And as a result, this book doesn't actually get to the heart of gay life or ask essential questions about what we do and who we are as queer people.
"Let's Get Back to the Party" and actually rethink why it is gay men are the way that they are and not rely on cliches to do it.
Rating: really liked it
Audio 5 Stars
Story 3.5 Stars
That ending though...
Rating: really liked it
Thinking of ourselves caught at the wrong party, at the wrong time. Born a little too early, or a little too late.I’ve been thinking about this book for a while, struggling to articulate what I liked about it and what I didn’t. Sometimes you just can’t put your finger on why a certain book clicked for you or not. Hey, on Goodreads I can just leave the space blank and let me my thoughts percolate (or turn into sludge like coffee grounds) but imagine being a professional and you have ‘reviewer’s block’…
One thing that struck me is how a book published in 2021 can already be out of date. This is largely due to the fact that gender and minority politics are so fluid right now, but it is also because Zak Salih deliberately focuses his story on a particular turning point in gay rights in the US, namely the right to get married as promulgated by the Supreme Court in 2015.
Needless to say, the book opens with a gay wedding as a stage to introduce our two main protagonists: Sebastian, whose long-term relationship has just come to a crashing end, and Oscar, who thinks that being married is akin to selling out to the devil. Sebastian and Oscar were childhood friends who eventually grew apart when Oscar moved away (following some judicious fooling around with each other), but Sebastian has always nurtured a little flame for his (seemingly) carefree friend. To his chagrin, Oscar does not recognise him at all and instead spends most of the wedding on his phone.
That is because he is arranging a hook-up for after the wedding, but the guy is MIA and off-line at the same time (haven’t we all been there). At the bar, Oscar meets an older man who he thinks is hitting on him, but they end up … just talking. This is ‘Sean Stokes’, a once famous gay author now in his 60s, whose muse and youth have long since departed, both probably hand in hand. The opening line of his first novel ‘Ecce Homo’ is essentially the philosophy that underpin a lifetime of lurid debauchery:
“I vow, henceforth, to live by cock alone.” (Somewhere Edmund White’s ears must be twitching).
Oscar only discovers this when he begins to read the copy of the book that Sean gives him. He is sufficiently intrigued to begin an email correspondence with the ageing author. It gives both men insight into opposite sides of the gay rainbow, as it were: Sean has an activist (and rutting) background of note, hailing from a time when being gay was an assault against the bastion of civilisation, and who thinks upstarts like Oscar have it way too easy and are squandering the possibilities of their hard-won freedoms.
Oscar, in turn, thinks that gay geezers like Sean have sold themselves, and the entire gay community, down the river by assimilating into straight society to the point where they are even getting married. What happened to ‘living by cock alone’ as the rallying cry of being truly and unrepentantly gay? School art teacher Sebastian, meanwhile, is increasingly fixated on a teenage pupil who reminds him of a boy in a Caravaggio painting. Uh oh, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. It is.
Curiously, Sebastian resents his pupil for being so carefree and open about his sexuality. Said pupil had no comprehension of, let alone empathy, with the agonies of youth that Sebastian’s closeted generation had to endure. I hasten to add that the psychological trauma Sebastian thinks has stunted his own gay sensibility well into adulthood is just an attempt to excuse himself for being such a dick in general.
So, you can see there is a lot going on in this book. Perhaps too much. My trouble with the two main characters is that, apart from them both being irredeemably unlikeable, they also seem to represent opposite ends of a debate rather than flesh-and-blood people. Yes, these are fictional people … But you know what I mean. The most ‘real’ person is the fictional author, a broad pastiche of White that is unfortunately more cringeworthy than it is flattering.
Another problem is that the book is told in the first person, with chapters alternating between ‘Oscar’ and ‘Sebastian’, and often giving different viewpoints on the same events. First person is technically difficult to pull off, and I don’t think Salih quite nails it here. There is also a bit of clumsy deus ex machina plotting that is far more melodramatic than it needs to be.
My wish for Salih as a writer is to forget about politics, posturing, wokeness, the legal and societal debates, and just to write gay characters and a gay novel stemming from that most important organ by which we all strive to live: the human heart.
Rating: really liked it
Thought provoking and relatable to people in the gay community. The battle between feeling “mainstream” while also feeling excluded from it is a constant paradox for our community. The writing style didn’t work for me, but I loved the messaging that the author was trying to convey to the audience.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars. A book about the push and pull of the gay community post-Obergefell, and how they play out individually for two former childhood friends.
Sebastian has just been dumped by his long-time boyfriend, who was miserable after they moved to a house in the country. Oscar's friends are all getting married and he is disgusted by the way gay men are assimilating into the world and losing their community and identity. For a few years when they were kids, before Oscar moved away, they were close friends, but then lost touch. For most of the book, Sebastian and Oscar are opposites. Everything about their lives is different. But they aren't always in the same place, sometimes they will end up still on opposite ends but having switched sides.
Another juxtaposition, they are obsessed with the past and the future of gay culture. Oscar makes friends with a famous gay novelist 30 years his senior who was best known for writing books that weren't much more than catalogs of sexual encounters. He admires the man, but not the melancholy old man in front of him, the young man on the page. Sebastian is obsessed with one of his students, a teen who has been out publicly for years, who has a boyfriend, who is able to live authentically in a way teenage Sebastian never could have dreamed. They are grappling with what it means to be in the middle of a generational shift. They are not the raucous and hardened generation that lived through the AIDS epidemic. They are not the youth coming up in a world where people come out as kids. Gay marriage is something they never grew up expecting, but suddenly have, and what does it mean?
I liked what the book was trying to do, but I think it didn't quite hold up in the second half. As Sebastian and Oscar fall apart in their own personal crises, we lose the thread of the themes. The book wants so much to put us precisely in time between the Obergefell ruling and the Pulse shooting, and sometimes it feels a bit too heavy-handed. And some may be frustrated to read because it's so limited in scope, focusing mostly on relatively well-off cis gay men in a large city, when we know that the battle is not all the way won for youth, for queer communities of color, for trans people. Like a lot of gay literature, the focus here is on gay men and no one else. Which is fine, but the fact that it's so much of a pattern always makes me wonder why it doesn't get more pushback.
Rating: really liked it
2.5, rounded up.
This sounded really interesting and intriguing in the synopsis, and I didn't wind up detesting it, but it didn't much live up to hopes and expectations either. Alternating between the perspectives of two gay men in their mid-30's, childhood friends meeting again after an interval of ten years, during the pivotal year 2016, right after the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality, they are meant to exemplify the opposing philosophies of whether gays are better off being 'normalized', or are giving up their essential uniqueness in assimilating. That would be fine, except I found both major characters equally annoying - Sebastian, surely a stand-in for the author himself, is something of a simp, whereas Oscar is a clichéd party boy.
Both spend most of their time pursuing others - Seb develops a rather ooky obsession with one of his 17 year old students, whereas Oscar becomes infatuated with an older famous gay author, apparently modelled after John Rechy. Perhaps because we are about the same age, I found this character to be the most relatable, although he remains something of a cipher (including a rather startling turn-about in his politics, which is never satisfactorily explained), and disappears from the proceedings all too soon. But perhaps my dissatisfaction stems from not really being able to connect nor sympathize with the main characters half my age.
The other thing that annoyed me is the author's tendency to jump around in the chronology and suddenly insert needless flashbacks, and it seemed a cheap shot to end the proceedings with the horrendous Pulse nightclub massacre. In actuality, I found the delightful anecdote from which the book takes its title to be more entertaining than anything that followed.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 Stars
In the absence of college classes, I read to educate myself as much as for fun. This book is definitely one for the former category. The true crux of this book is what it means to be a gay man in today's world. To be honest (and I'm admitting this with embarrassment), it never even occurred to me that there would be an alternative opinion outside of happiness when the US Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was legal. In this book, we meet two character's on opposite ends of that viewpoint. Sebastian (wanted to be seen as 'normal' to society and welcomed SCOTUS' decision) and Oscar who found the decision abhorrent and prickled at how the struggle was lost and that straight women invaded gay bars and took 'his space' over. Both characters have a history from childhood and flit in and out of each other's lives. They both view the other as the antithesis of what life as a gay man should be. As the book progresses, Sebastian and Oscar have their views challenged by the other as well fall off kilter in their routines due to the force of new people entering their lives. In Sebastian's life, he becomes almost enamored by a student of his who lives his life openly gay and proud. In Oscar's instance, he meets an author who served as a pillar in the gay community who was most famously known for his books on his sexual conquests and later his writing on the death of gay men in the 80s.
Watching Oscar and Sebastian go through life was uncomfortable, cringe-worthy (at times), maddening (I mean how self-destructive can you be?), but also insightful. I really appreciate the opportunity to have read this book (thank you Algonquin Books) and recommend this as an important read.
Review Date: 02/26/21
Publication Date: 02/16/21
Rating: really liked it
I liked this book so much, and am still thinking about it days later. I'm not in the headspace to leave a coherent review, so for now I'm literally just gonna copy my tweets about it here like a nerd:
It's been four days since I read @ZMSalih1982's LET'S GET BACK TO THE PARTY and I can't stop thinking about it and how beautifully it captures shifts in the queer experience from generation to generation and ways in which grass looks greener on the other sides of those shifts.
I think it makes a particularly fascinating read for adults operating in the queer YA space, and how each protag relates to the teen secondary character works in conversation with our books. Also made me grateful for the few spectacular YAs focusing on queer history.
I also really love the way its bracketed by touchstone events in very modern queer history, one the height of joy and celebration and one the depth of sadness and mourning. How these events are theoretically communal but neither protag particularly is. Such an interesting study.
It's the kind of book that immediately made me think of whom I'd recommend it to and as a Person Who Does That a Lot, those books have such a special place in my heart and I *will* find a way to get it into those hands. Mark my words.
Rating: really liked it
There have been so many novels about the post-Stonewall years and the AIDs years, when gays were outcasts and dying. And now there are so many where gayness is just another trait, like eye color, drawing no criticism or curiosity at all. It's harder to find books about the in-between of those eras, where I consider myself: perspectives that have no real relationship with gayness being a crime but that are mystified by kids nowadays being able to have same-sex relationships in middle school. Both seem alien. This book targets that in-between. The extremes of past and present are romanticized and grappled with in a way that feels authentic to me. These are feelings I have felt and still feel.
I don't think this is a perfect book (the characters are very broad and there's some melodrama it could've cut) but it feels like a much-needed book, and I'm glad it exists.
Rating: really liked it
I started this book with an open mind, but reading this book was more difficult to get through. I was not too fond of the writing preference to have Sebastian sections did not include quotation marks to indicate when someone spoke, but Oscar sections used quotation for dialogue. As a reader, the quotation marks help us following the conversation and distinguish it from descriptions. It allows the reader to enjoy the story instead of increasing our concentration to realize a thought and what was spoken by the characters during conversations.
I also could not connect with the characters. Both Sebastian and Oscar just annoyed me, and I disliked them more as the book progressed. They appeared to be two whining men who wanted things to change, but they continued to live the same way, expecting a different outcome. The ending just left me lost. Was Oscar in the water the whole time, and the "moment" with Sebastian didn't really happen? The book ends with Oscar in the water yelling for help, so does that mean he eventually drowns? If anyone can explain the ending to me, I welcome it.
This book really was not for me. Maybe it will resonate with other readers better. I appreciated all the author's work for this debut book; it's not easy to write a novel. Thank you, NetGalley and Algonquin, for this free copy in exchange for my honest review.
Content Warnings: homophobia, fatphobia, suicide, child pornography, harassment of women, sex descriptions, death, alcohol abuse.
Rating: really liked it
I got quite invested in this he said / he said - will they? / won’t they? struggle and examination of gay identity and the ways gay men present themselves. There is a lot of sadness and loneliness at this “party” but that atmosphere allowed me to quietly reflect on what it means to be a boy and a man.
“You’ll start to confuse the past for the present. You'll start wishing things were—which is the way they had to be to bring you to where you are now.”
Rating: really liked it
3.5/5 StarsThis was a really interesting discussion on the yearning that many younger queer people have for the community and activist eras of the past, compared with the yearning that many queer adults have for the freedom that many queer teens and young people have nowadays. I think the two narrators did a fantastic job on this audiobook but ultimately this book was just okay for me - nothing amazing - though I did enjoy my time reading it and it was a great accompaniment to the frantic crocheting I spent last week doing!
Thanks to Alongquin Books/Workman Audio and Netgalley for an audiobook ARC in return for an honest review!
Rating: really liked it
What a fantastic read I enjoyed!
I found this story fascinating as Salih used the historical references about the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling as the basis and jumping off point of the story. This novel explores the identity of two gay men in our current society. Salih did a great job of painting a story about what lies between being closeted and then now being completely accepted, with the increased visibility in every part of our lives and in almost all cultures as well.
The writing of these two very different characters between Oscar and Sebastian, the readers learn about the struggles of not only these two gay men, but also what the LGBTQ community have been struggling with for many years. I found the writing impressive for a debut novel and found it compelling enough to be the thought provoking read I really appreciated.
I really enjoyed reading about the differing point of views on how they see themselves as adults and their gay cultural identity in this contemporary setting. I really enjoyed this one and please do check this out especially if you have enjoyed the novels of Rebecca Makkai and Claire Messud.
Thank you to Algonquin Books for my copy, and opinions are my own.
