Peter Weltner's first novel Identity & Difference alternately tells two rather straightforward stories. Preston is a self-absorbed gay man in San Francisco who doesn't need to work and who spends too much time analyzing and agonizing over his relationship with Jim. Darryl, a working-class teenager in San Mateo, is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother Glenn.

Their stories never intersect and are even stylistically different. Preston's is told in a somewhat distant, analytical third person, while Darryl relates his own story in a searching and immediate first person voice. Yet despite what sounds like a disjointed, unsatisfactory approach to the narrative, Identity & Difference is a deeply moving and wholly satisfying work.

The novel's two-story structure resembles William Faulkner's The Wild Palms and like that book, Identity & Difference succeeds by juxtaposing its stories in ways that are seldom obvious but some-how always feel right. On the surface Preston and Darryl are about as different as two young men can be yet both are deeply involved with understanding and accepting aspects of their sexuality.

Preston, older than Darryl and more experienced sexually, is nevertheless the emotionally immature one, groping toward commitment and monogamy in his relationship with Jim. Darryl only begins to accept his homosexuality by the end of the book, but seems much better prepared to face the difficulties of coming out and loving men.

shared experience

Weltner's exploration of the differences between the men, instead of pulling the book apart into two distinct narrative and stylistic clumps, weaves together their dis-parate experiences into a unified, non-linear whole that actually ends up celebrating the sense of a shared "gay male experience."

This all sounds dauntingly theoretical, but Identity & Difference, despite its thesis-like title, is a novel grounded in characters and in charting their emotional geography. It is a book that, on the surface, is driven forward by suspense (Will Preston and Jim stay together?) and mystery (Why did Darryl's brother kill himself?). Yet it is the tension between the alternating sections and characters that propel the novel emotionally.

An objective narrator, emphasizing the verbal, tells Preston's sections. The triangle that develops between Preston, Jim, and Preston's former trick Bert thrives on self-analysis, on long probing conversations that sound almost stilted, as all intellectual talk of emotions will.

Darryl, on the other hand, tells his own story and keeps his emotions scrupulously to himself. Even in his interior monologue, his attempts at understanding his brothers death, his steps to remold himself into thc image of Glenn, and his own as yet embryonic attraction to other men are haunting, frustrating and ultimately poetic.

emotionally satisfying

Weltner's creation is emotionally satisfying as well. He skillfully coordinates the separate narrative threads, balancing an analytically climactic conversation between Jim and Preston with the powerful, heartbreaking revelation Darryl finds in some old letters to Glenn. There is a sense that neither thread would have quite the same impact without the other to reflect and resonant off.

Identity & Difference takes some risks in attempting to speak about the lives of gay men in a unique and challenging way. For its intelligence and compassion, it deserves every serious fiction reader's attention. Hunt it down and enjoy.