Books Archive

Stephen McCauley
Simon & Schuster, 2006
$24 (hardcover); $14 (paperback)
By Keven Renken
For better or worse, Stephen
McCauley will always be known as the
author of The Object of My Affections.
That’s what having your fiction
debut turned into a 1998 big-screen
movie starring Jennfer Aniston will do
to a guy.
But McCauley is more than the
sum of his parts. In five novels starting
in 1988, he has built a career on
chronicling the lives and loves of the
late 20th-century gay everymale. And
even though his work is remarkably
short on the AIDS-related grief that dominates the work of
many of his fellow authors, he nonetheless remains a witty
and often astute observer of human nature.
With Alternatives to Sex, McCauley firmly entrenches us
in the 21st century and casts a clever, Oscar Wilde-esque
eye on the ever-changing relationships between men. Yes,
we’re talking about the internet, and the eminent hookups
made there-on. William Collins, the seeker of the aforementioned
alternatives, is a gay real-estate agent in Boston
who’s closer to fifty than he cares to admit. Online, however,
he assumes the name of Everett and has been engaged for the
past year in a bout of computer dating (a euphemism for brief
sexual encounters) that is clearly going nowhere.
Off-line his life is hardly more fulfilling. His sales figures
are disappointing (“You’re gone, William. . .I can’t find
you,” his boss says at one point) and his tenant, a passiveaggressive
artist with the unlikely name of Kumiko Rothberg,
has only paid rent twice in the past eighteen months. His
good friend Edward, a flight attendant haunted by the
specter of 9/11 – the tragedy replaces AIDS as the pall cast
over everyone’s lives – is a potential boyfriend, but neither
can get past the sarcasm long enough to be sincere with
one another.
Into this maelstrom of an existence enters Charlotte
O’Malley and Samuel Thompson, comfortably well-off, notso
comfortably married, and “not looking aggressively” for
the ideal city apartment. What begins as a simple desire to
score a sale soon begins to fill a void in William’s life, one
that is lacking in proper human connection. This connection,
obviously, should include Edward. What is obvious
isn’t always easy, however, and William has miles to go
before he can accept some kind of commitment in his life.
What remains amazingly fresh about McCauley’s writing
after twenty years is that he manages to take readers in ever
more surprising directions, even if the road he’s traveling
seems to be all too obvious. From the first mention of
Edward, for instance, it’s apparent where this is all headed.
The fact that the area remains grey makes the novel more
a mirror of real life than a fiction with a happy Hollywood
ending. Perhaps this is McCauley’s answer to the cinematic
Affections. Or perhaps he is simply reminding us that life
has no clear resolution of its own and simply goes forward,
lessons learned or not.
It’s a pity that the object of William’s affections is
probably the least interesting person in the book. There are
any number of characters who flirt with cynicism – an often
sodden Charlotte being one of them – but they also have
abundant amounts of charm and insightful interaction with
William. Edward often comes across as simply bitter and
a bit of a nut-job – at one point William has to go retrieve
him after he has something resembling a nervous breakdown
– and the fact that so much time is spent pining over
him almost amounts to skimming material. Likewise, it
must be difficult to keep the tongue planted in the cheek
for so much of one’s career, and in some places McCauley’s
humor seems a little cliché and forced. At one point,
William, commenting on a trick’s nice apartment, says, “On
the whole, I’m much less judgmental about a person’s
sexual interests than I am about his window treatments.”
Nonetheless these are small things in the bigger scheme
of having a very enjoyable read over the course of 289
pages. McCauley has no pretensions to telling the stories
of our lives in the age of the AIDS cocktail – he is not so
much interested in the larger tragedy as in the smaller
portions of sadness that populate are our lives as our hearts
beat, break and heal again. In the meantime he also makes
us smile, and that is in and of itself no small achievement.

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