SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- It’s a lot to fit into one narrative, but Davison — a professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State — wisely allows the heady stuff to marinate in the form of the impressively authentic, familiar conversations (or, in many cases, fights) between Thomas and the members of his unusual but endearing family, friends and lovers.
Thanks to the care Davison pays to his characters — each one a fully realized, thinking human in Thomas’ orbit — what could be an overserving of tragedy is instead delivered with clarity and nuance. The result is a novel that manages to take on a number of the world’s traumas without ever being swallowed whole, instead using the personal travails of a gay man at the dusk of Obama’s America to probe at the nature of what it truly means to know oneself.