Let's Get Back to the Party

By: Zak Salih

Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Will Damron

“A gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now . . . A raw and captivating debut.”—BookPage

Recommended by: O, the Oprah Magazine * BuzzFeed * The Millions * Cosmopolitan * Electric Literature * Literary Hub * Harper's Bazaar * Lambda Literary * LGBTQ Reads * Passport magazine * Paperback Paris * Debutiful * Book Riot * The Bay Area Reporter * The Advocate

It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling. A high school art history teacher, Sebastian Mote envies his queer students and their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame. When he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, DC, he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in more than a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history, nor in the sense of belonging Sebastian craves. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties, friends coupling off and having babies. For Oscar, conformity isn’t peace, it’s surrender.

While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line be­tween envy and obsession: Sebastian with one of his students, Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must reckon not just with each other but with themselves. Provocative, moving, and rich with sharply drawn characters, Let’s Get Back to the Party introduces an exciting and contemporary new talent.

©2021 Zak Salih (P)2022 Algonquin Books

Critic reviews

​“A miracle of a book. A love letter to queer friendship and queer love . . . that also, in its sparkling prose and exquisite storytelling, announces the arrival of a major talent.”—Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer and Sweet Low

“With gorgeous, searching prose, Zak Salih looks beyond the gay culture wars to find the fractured souls within—and locates something deep and true and universal. This exceptional debut signals the arrival of a compelling new voice in fiction.”—Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln

“[A] searching, incisive debut novel . . . Estranged for decades, Salih's dual protagonists spend the novel circling and avoiding each other, a dance of love, friendship and self-definition . . . Salih's novel thrums with details and moments that keep the material from ever edging toward the schematic. Instead, Let's Get Back to the Party is as rich in feeling and compelling in its storytelling as it is acute in its analysis. This gripping and thoughtful novel asks urgent questions about what it means to be a gay man in contemporary American culture.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review

Bleh

Read this for a book group and when we opened up the discussion I boldly declared that I thought this was not a good book, with undeveloped characters, a plot that is boring and not very well written. I have never gone that far out on a limb before hearing from anyone else and lo nearly everyone else agreed with me. I hate to pan LGBTQ fiction as I want to nurture authors and their publishers, but sorry just can't fake it for this.

Michael Crouch is a terrible narrator.

In my opinion, there are two types of queer novels, regardless of genre: sweet or sour. The former celebrate found family, self-acceptance, and love. The latter focus on status, bitterness, and bitchiness. Let's Get Back to the Party is sweet AND sour. Salih's intelligence and perspective are interesting and fresh.

I found the character of Sebastian hard to take, even separate from the fact that he is voiced by Michael Crouch. Crouch reads every book the same way, with a weird sing-song cadence that really bothers me. Maybe it's okay when he's voicing a teenager, but completely inappropriate here. Oscar, for all his faults, was much relatable and likeable to me. I very much enjoyed his chapters.

Still, in spite of Crouch, highly recommended for its take on the modern queer generation gap.

Great book if you want to be depressed

I hated how this made me feel. The pulse shooting is the cherry on top of a horribly depressing cake. Some books just don’t need to be written.

Decent characters, slow plot

This one was a little too slow for me. I suppose it's alright if you like just the internal conflict, but I feel like it was a little too introspective.