I just finished reading Fellow Travelers, a book about two men who share a tumultuous romance set against the backdrop of the Red Scare in 1950s Washington, D.C. The novel was written by Thomas Mallon.
My only experience with romance novels were brooding classics, like Jane Eyre and Wurthering Heights I read in school. With my new Kindle, I’ve been reading much more. Fellow Travelers was my first male/male romance novel. I did not imagine this book would leave such an impression on me.
What I didn’t like: It is *dense* with political references, like the author sandwiched a gay romance into a transcript of the McCarthy communist hearings. I think the author was a bit too eager in this aspect (he writes mostly about political history) and I found myself glossing over the historical stuff until the protagonists were mentioned again. It needs some patience, but boy does it pay off.
What i loved: Hawkins and Fuller’s romance. Wow! What an emotional rollercoaster!
Hawkins (or Hawk, as only Tim calls him) is the handsome, experienced, older man with a rising government career and Tim is the young political writer, who is the romantic neophyte. Their frequent and passionate trysts are had with careful discretion, so they are not discovered by the inquisitors trying to root out communists and other ‘subversives’ in the federal government.
It’s not a simple dom/sub relationship, because things get complicated. Hawk keeps Tim emotionally distant, because he won’t let himself get attached to him. Hawk has to “keep up appearances” as an upstanding Protestant civil servant, while secretly having a passionate affair with a devoutly Catholic young man. Meanwhile, Tim falls deeper in love with Hawk, but is dissatisfied by his reticence to be more emotionally available.
Eventually, Tim gets fed up with Hawk’s mind games and runs off to join the army; thinking if he becomes a good soldier, he can get over Hawk and help America defeat Russia. But, the heart wants what it wants, and so, Tim agonizes over parting with Hawk, moreso when he’s deployed to a foreign country. When he learns that Hawk is moving on and marrying a woman, Tim is distraught and dives deeper into his Catholic faith to seek succor for his aching heart.
At first, i was upset that the author made Tim break away from Hawk, because he was so madly in love with him and it didn’t make sense to run away. I suspect this was a bit of emotional manipulation on the author’s part, but i’ll admit it worked because *holy shit*, when Hawk and Tim do reunite and are alone together for the first time in 2 years, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that i teared up and paced around to calm down. I’ve never had such a visceral reaction to a novel before. Sure, i’ve been moved, saddened, and elated at beautiful passages in a book, but the author successfully built the anticipation up with each page until the dam of emotion broke with an “I love you”.
I won’t spoil the ending so i’ll end it here. If you’re interested in watching the Showtime adaption (starring Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey), i implore you to read the book first. It’s not terribly long and you will “feel the feels”, as the kids say.
Like I’ve said, this is my first male/male romance novel, and as a gay man who doesn’t really read romance (much less m/m romance), this really resonated me. You might be thinking “This sounds so tropey and trite” and it’s fine if you do, but I just wanted to post this as a way to process my thoughts and feelings on the book.
by BashfulJuggernaut