The Town of Babylon

Starred review from February 7, 2022
A gay Latinx man reckons with his past when he returns home for his 20th high school class reunion in Varela’s dazzling debut. Back in his unnamed suburban hometown, Andres, now a professor of public health, crosses paths at the reunion with Jeremy, his first love; and Paul, a homophobic bully. As an old malaise returns, he confronts his feelings about his older brother’s death a decade earlier, and Varela sets the stage for a series of backstories. After being spurned by Jeremy as a high school senior, Andres begins frequenting a local cruising site known as the Queer Steer. Of Andres’s burgeoning identity, Varela writes, “Gay was after all dangerous.... Gay was a death sentence. Gay was a target.” Now, in the days after the reunion, Andres jeopardizes his marriage by reigniting things with Jeremy. He also confronts Paul, a Christian minister at a storefront church, about beating a gay man at the Queer Steer years earlier. Varela ably describes teenage Andres’s conflicted feelings toward Paul, who overcompensated in high school for being scrawny: “a push and pull of desire, belief, and self-hatred.” Throughout, he wrings a great deal of emotion from Andres’s return. It makes for an incandescent bildungsroman.

March 15, 2022
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.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 9, 2022

DEBUT In this distinctive, multilayered debut, Andr�s, a professor of public health, returns to his working-class hometown to tend to his ailing father and finds himself reluctantly attending attends his 20th high school reunion. There, he's reunited with key people in his life, including first love Jeremy; learns that his valiant close friend Simone is in a psychiatric hospital; and faces the bullying Paul, now a Christian minister, whom he challenges for having beaten a gay man in high school even as he has the generosity to consider that Paul was compensating for his own sense of inadequacy. Andr�s is in town without his husband, whose infidelity he has just discovered, and while there he has a liaison with Jeremy, now married to a woman. But he's out of place here, angry at the values he sees around him and how much things haven't changed. He is an exceptional character, astute, accomplished, and able to articulate his frustrations. VERDICT Varela delivers an effortless blend of the deeply personal, as Andr�s reflects on the past and his current difficulties with his husband, and the sociopolitical, offering a sharp critique of a capitalist society hostile to immigrants.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.