The Golden Gate

John Brown's loneliness, the kind that a successful computer career and a rotating cast of interested friends can't actually touch, is the engine under the novel's satire of Reagan-era California: Janet Hayakawa places a personal ad on his behalf out of loyalty rather than romance, and the trial lawyer Liz Dorati who answers it draws John into a social world, EST-style self-actualization seminars, nuclear-freeze activism, wine country weekends, built entirely around the promise that enough effort can fix what's actually just an unwillingness to be known.

Liz's own drift, first toward John, then toward his best friend Phil Weiss, a former nuclear engineer turned peace activist wrestling with the same industry Liz's politics oppose, gives the novel its clearest example of how thin the line runs between romantic and political conviction in this milieu: characters keep falling in love at exactly the meetings and marches where they're supposedly falling in love with a cause instead.

Ed, Liz's brother, spends the novel wrestling with his own homosexuality against the Catholicism he can't quite set down, and Seth gives him none of the comic detachment he affords John's circle of engineers and lawyers: Ed's chapters are the novel's most unguarded, a reminder that under all the verse form's formal cleverness sits a genuinely serious inventory of what 1980s San Francisco actually asked its residents to reconcile.

Seth builds all 590 stanzas on the same aBaBccDDeFFeGG rhyme scheme and iambic tetrameter Pushkin used for Eugene Onegin, by way of Charles Johnston's English translation, which Seth has said he read compulsively before starting his own book. The strictness is the joke and the achievement at once: watching Silicon Valley office politics, self-actualization seminars, and nuclear-freeze rallies submit to a nineteenth-century Russian verse form generates most of the novel's comedy, while the discipline the form demands keeps that comedy from curdling into mere cleverness.

Liz's cat, which John can't stand and which Liz refuses to negotiate about, recurs across the novel as the kind of ordinary domestic friction that never makes it into a synopsis but quietly decides whether two people can actually live together, and Seth's willingness to spend real stanzas on a cat is itself an argument: a household is built or broken at exactly this scale of irritant, not by the grander incompatibilities everyone assumes matter more.