A classics scholar who teaches at Princeton, a gay man who has both embraced the sexual free market that is New York in the ’90s and devoted himself, as a godfather, to the raising of a friend’s child, Mendelsohn brings an unpolemical intelligence and astonishing erudition to his task. He writes about his own hybrid life–suspended between straight and gay worlds, between promiscuity and paternity–in a book that is itself a hybrid: part personal memoir, part cultural essay, part classics lesson. He can bounce from the Narcissus myth in Ovid to cruising for boys in Chelsea to a meditation on the difference between homosexual and heterosexual desire with no sense of strain. In one chapter, a discussion of Sophocles’ “Antigone” connects to his discovery of a long-buried family secret about his great-great-aunt, a fresh explanation of the allure of tragedy and a disquisition on the way we create person-al mythologies to construct our sense of who we are.
The pleasure of this book is the pleasure of following an original mind making connections and discoveries previously unarticulated. His invocation of the classics is refreshingly free of the academic, just as his thinking about gay identity pays no heed to political correctness. (Just mentioning Narcissus and homosexuality in the same sentence will be a provocation in some circles.) There will no doubt be those who would rather be spared the details of Mendelsohn’s busy erotic history, but the tone is not confessional. He writes with such elegant Apollonian style and bracing honesty that even his most Dionysian recollections steer clear of self-indulgence. It’s a one-of-a-kind book–wise, startling and wonderfully unclassifiable.
