Liars and Saints

 "Down Time"--by a writer I love, Andrew Martin--is a novel in which very little happens. It's almost shocking that something so "unresolved" still found a publisher. On the website "Book Marks," literary novels rarely earn a "pan" designation. But one magazine did actually "pan" this book. And yet I really liked "Down Time." The center is Aaron, a gifted writer of short stories who is drinking himself to death. "I think I might need to go back to a place," he says to his spouse, Cassandra, after having thrown himself into a bonfire at a party. But, in rehab, Aaron meets a troubled young man, Xavier, and discovers that he (Aaron) enjoys gay sex (first exclusively on the top, but ultimately in every possible position). In the months after rehab, Aaron continues to see Xavier but keeps this a secret from Cassandra. The disturbed marriage endures several months in a "pandemic pod" with Aaron's stepmoth...

Like most people trying to get by in something like the regular current of American life, I don't act like a total asshole to most people I meet, and am generally regarded as *pretty nice* -- mainly because I leave myself vulnerable to hearing out other people's crises and complaints for longer, on average, than would be merely polite. And the fact is, I do tend to like people in practice, even though I've built an airtight case against them in principle. It's a natural response, I guess, to being raised by relatively kind parents who taught me to be polite and decent and to rely on the company and help of others, but to also consider myself smarter and, on some fundamental level, more deserving of complete fulfillment than anyone in the world besides maybe my sisters. This may be why, when my girlfriend, Julia, asked me to meet her at the house of a recent acquaintance of ours, a New Age-leaning woman named Anna whose family, through what specific brand of plunder I ...