Which line stopped you? Mine's on page 129.
We left off with Horace back home after things didn't pan out in Hollywood, and Aaron trying to build a life for himself through the heartbreak of losing him.
Chapter 11 was the first time I felt myself getting lost in the timeline. Aaron talks about being single, without a wife and kids, and my mind got caught in the back and forth: the Horace timeline, before Aaron would have been married, and the Xavier timeline, where he was. That's one of the built-in risks of running multiple timelines. I think Newson handles it well, but as a reader I had to stop and reorient myself. Worth noticing if you're writing across timelines: the reader needs an anchor early in the scene, some detail of age or place or marital status that quietly says where you are before the emotional content starts landing. When that anchor arrives a beat late, the reader spends the paragraph doing math instead of feeling.
I'm also impressed by how well-researched this novel feels. We're inside a fictitious story, and I still come away feeling like I've learned something about the industry and the period, without the sense that I'm reading a textbook. That is not an easy thing to pull off. There's a short passage on page 126 about LAX running on temporary terminals through the 1950s, while design disputes and cost overruns delayed the real ones, and how those stopgap buildings went poorly maintained. It's a couple of sentences. It sets the scene, dates it precisely, and slips a little commentary in sideways. There are several passages like this in the book, and none of them drone on. That's the whole trick: research earns its place when it's doing two jobs at once, and when it stops before it becomes a lecture.
Chapter 12 gave me more of how Aaron meets Kimberly, which was satisfying after my earlier confusion about where she entered the story. By the end of the chapter, Aaron discloses his sexuality to her. Her response is harsh, and even so, you can see the value for both of them in continuing with the marriage. That's the harder version of this scene to write. Not a rupture and not a reconciliation, but two people doing arithmetic in real time.
This week we get into Part 2, which opens at a party where Aaron grandstands with the Sidney Poitier to get him to pass on a film Aaron sees for Xavier. Poitier adheres, shooting begins, and then word comes that Horace has died during a plane stunt. Aaron somehow convinces Xavier to go to Chicago so he can attend the funeral and pass as a closer friend of Horace's than he was.
They seem to get away with it, though it feels like Gladys has an inkling about Aaron and Horace. It's never said explicitly. You feel it in the tension between the two of them, and Xavier has enough charm to smooth it over just enough. Notice how much Newson gets done without a single line of confrontation: the suspicion lives entirely in what a character declines to say.
Sticking with the pattern we've been tracking, something happens with the sex scenes here too. In the middle of grief, Aaron and Xavier overstep the night before the funeral, and it's the first time Aaron has slept with a man since marrying Kimberly. Their relationship hangs in the balance afterward. If you take one thing from this section: a sex scene should cost the characters something or change what's possible between them. Otherwise it's decoration.
There are parallels being drawn between Aaron's relationship with Horace and his relationship with Xavier, and page 183 reads like a deliberate callback. During the funeral, Aaron describes weeping quietly, aware that no physical comfort was coming to him. It sent me straight back to the moment Horace was telling his life story and Aaron couldn't comfort him for fear of how it would look in public. Same withholding, different man, years apart. That's the payoff of an echo. Newson never has to tell us Aaron is repeating a life. The sentence does it for him.
We end with Xavier signing a new deal and leaving Skyline Motion Pictures. Their relationship is severed at that point, with a lot still unanswered about the line they crossed.
I'm curious: what is it about a line of literature that strikes you? That makes you want to savor it, or hold onto it? When do you find that happening in this story?
A few lines stopped me in my tracks here. This is one of the things I love most about reading, and one of the places I'm most often inspired. Many of us are putting words together. It's the moments when I feel the weight of the emotional stakes that impress me most.
In this section, it was page 129: "It might have been vain of me; I'm certain it was human." This comes in response to Aaron's trysts in the LAX bathrooms. It's a simple line, and it's grounding in a way that says to be human is to be vain. That lands as true for Aaron and for the reader in the same beat.
With love, and a dog-eared page,
Ashley
