Gay In Gray

Back fresh from Auburn Chautauqua 2010. You should've been there. Man crushes are okay, right?

Here's Dan Zak: NEW YORK — He sneaks a cigarette in the stairwell, through an emergency exit whose alarm does not sound. He sits on the eighth step, places a porcelain ashtray to the side of his bare feet and lights an American Spirit. He watches a curl of smoke creep toward the chicken-wired skylight in the roof of his Chelsea condo building.

If he were writing this passage, he'd start the next sentence with "Here is," his favorite device for centering the reader after a tumble of description. As in: Here is the novelist Michael Cunningham, on a Monday, in shades of gray — gray of hair, gray of shirt, grayed in by concrete and cigarette ash, and gray of perspective on what, if anything, it means to be a gay novelist who's written a fairly gay book at a very gay time.