THE TOWN OF BABYLON

A visit to his suburban hometown prompts a series of reckonings for Andres, a gay Latinx man.

It’s been nearly 20 years since Andres, a professor of public health, exiled himself from Babylon—whose exact location debut author Varela leaves pointedly vague. Now, with his father recovering from surgery and his husband on a business trip in Namibia, he's reluctantly returned. His marriage has been in crisis since he discovered his husband’s infidelity, and, back home in Babylon, he's haunted by memories of his late brother, Henry. With few distractions besides his parents, immigrants who pride themselves on their hard work and unconditional love for their children, he decides to attend his 20th high school reunion, though not without some hesitation. His classmates represent, for Andres, everything he ran away from and swore never to return to: the drudgery of the White working class. Here a catalog of backstories unfolds in detail that is sometimes exhaustive and unnecessary. Andres meets Jeremy, a crush from high school with whom he’d become close friends and developed a romance. There's also Paul, whose scrawniness—in Andres’ memory—was such a source of insecurity that he overcompensated by being loud and obnoxious and surly. Paul is now the minister of a storefront church, and Andres has not let go of his suspicion that he was responsible for a hate crime that killed a local gay man. The pressure on his marriage increases as Andres continues to see Jeremy after the reunion and as his past muddles any picture he'd had of his future. The secondary characters do have some life to them, but they sometimes feel like they're stuck in the tropes Andres has cast them in. And while the novel’s achievement lies in its simultaneous depth and expansiveness—its huge ensemble of characters, the precision with which the landscape and culture of Andres’ hometown are rendered—it is sometimes overwritten, lapsing into heavy-handed social and political observation that falls short of revelation.

A sprawling, sometimes muddled bildungsroman.