The Town of Babylon

Description

A FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE 

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022 – Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, LitHub, Electric Literature, LGBTQ Reads, Latinx in Publishing

*Recommended by The New York Times*

In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.CONTENTS
 
1. SIDEWALKS
2. SUBURBS
3. ITALIAN RESTAURANTS
4. NUNS
5. OPEN BAR
6. HIGH SCHOOL
7. MOM & DAD
8. PARKING LOTS
9. BASEMENTS
10. BAGELS
11. HENRY
12. PEARL JAM
13. THE NEIGHBORHOOD
14. LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM
15. PAUL’S DAD
16. COUPLES COUNSELING
17. FRIDAY NIGHTS
18. SUNDAY MASS
19. COMMUNITY COLLEGE
20. MARTYRDOM
21. THE HOLY SPIRIT
22. SAINT JOSEPH
23. MARGARITAS
24. GETAWAY
 
ACKNOWL EDGMENTSA FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

A LIBRARY JOURNAL AND PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY “BEST BOOK OF 2022”

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022 – Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, LitHub, Electric Literature, LGBTQ Reads, Latinx in Publishing

*Recommended by The New York Times*

“Intimate and expansive, universal and local, funny and heartbreaking, Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon delivers a rich, energetic narrative of life and death in an American suburb. A gay Latinx man returns to his hometown to care for ailing parents and finds himself forced to confront the histories of love, loss, struggle, and sacrifice that, for better and worse, have formed him. With this urgent, vivid novel, Varela has given us a modern classic and an indelible portrait of our times.”
—A Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction, The National Book Foundation

“Unsparing yet big-hearted, The Town of Babylon will delight anyone who’s ever dreaded a school reunion—or believed they’d outgrown a community. Varela throws open the closet of queer suburban adolescence with verve, empathy, and insight. A deeply moving debut.”
—Julian Lucas, staff writer, The New Yorker

“In portraying Babylon, the diverse working-class Long Island town where he grew up, Varela paid attention to the heart disease, drug abuse, and dwindling economic opportunities that add up to a kind of communal stress and desperation. But the book, set over a week following a 20th high school reunion, also features sex and longing, love for family and friends, and an overarching wry affection.”
—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“A richly textured portrait of ordinary queer life.” 
—Book Riot

“The Town of Babylon is a grown up and realistic story that thoughtfully depicts the struggle to find out how to deal with the past when all you want is to move forward.”
—David Vogel, BuzzFeed

“The Town of Babylon foregrounds the way social differences play out between white and non-white, non-white and non-white, white and white. Despite what some of the United States population would like to believe, differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion cannot be elided, cannot go unseen. Varela’s keen attentiveness to the everyday unraveling of such relations indicates his sensitivity to the conditions of life as we know it.”
—Marcos Gonsalez, Protean Magazine

“[Varela’s] precise pacing of [the] pivotal moments make for storytelling both riveting and poignant… [the novel’s] distinct and intertwining narrative voices justify the rich and pointed cultural critique of the American suburb.”
—Benedict Nguyễn, INTO

“A dynamic and resonant debut . . . Hopefully there will be more books to come from the talented Varela.”
—Bay Area Reporter

“Line for vivid line, Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon is a deep breath of fresh air, while idea for incisive idea it is a howl of righteous rage. Rage at the suburbs, at the past, at a country whose promises are glibly made and rarely kept, at all the great and small ways we betray each other and ourselves. But it’s also a novel about love. Love’s power, limits, and impossible persistence in the first and last places we think to look for it. The Town of Babylon is a remarkable debut from a tremendous new voice.”
—Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost

“In The Town of Babylon, Alejandro Varela, whose educational background is in public health, combines a social scientist’s powers of observation and analysis with a master writer’s ability to delineate character in rich, absorbing prose. This is a challenging, fascinating portrait of contemporary America.”
—John Clum, New York Journal of Books

“New York-based Latino writer Alejandro Varela weaves together histories of immigration, economic unease, and the health complications of racism in America.”
—Marcela Rodés, Al Día

“A gay Latinx man reckons with his past when he returns home for his 20th high school class reunion in Varela’s dazzling debut . . . an incandescent bildungsroman”
—Starred review, Publisher’s Weekly

“Varela’s debut novel shimmers with tension, navigating the personal and political with practiced ease. Treading the waters of adolescence and adulthood, The Town of Babylon navigates the complexities of home, queerness, and messy histories with measure and empathy. Weaving together histories of immigration, economic unease, and the health complications of racism in America, Varela troubles ideas of community and shared experience amidst a polarizing landscape.”
—Kaitlynn Cassady, Seminary Co-op Bookstores

“The novel’s achievement lies in its simultaneous depth and expansiveness—its huge ensemble of characters, the precision with which the landscape and culture of Andres’ hometown are rendered.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon takes the tedium and heartbreak of life and renders it in extraordinary ways. I am astonished by the way Varela captures that difficult liminality: where love, under certain circumstances, slights as much as it heals. He gets to the core of all the human pressures of living in a country where everything—everything—has a price. The Town of Babylon is haunting, sublime, solemn, and true.”
—Robert Jones Jr., author of The New York Times bestselling The Prophets, finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction

“Alejandro Varela’s debut dazzles, astonishes, and grabs hold of your heart through the very last page. Heartbreak and secrets abound in this intense, astute meditation on race, family, class, love, and friendship. Varela’s wry humor is the icing on the cake of this brilliant novel.”
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction

“In Alejandro Varela’s assured debut, a man’s reluctant return to his hometown reveals that the past is not as distant as we sometimes tell ourselves it is. The Town of Babylon is funny and sexy as well as thoughtful, even heartbreaking. It’s an incisive taxonomy of the American suburb, looking beyond the white picket fence to tell a different story—what it is to be queer, the child of immigrants, and a person of color in this country.”
—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind, finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction

“The Town of Babylon is epic, intimate, hilarious, and heartrending: an unqualified achievement of the highest degree. Alejandro Varela captures suburbia’s gridlocked travails alongside the infinitude of the heart, excavating and illuminating questions of home, family, debt, and happiness. It’s as much a love story as it is a story about love in the world, broaching the impossible question of whether we can ever really go home again—but Varela clears it with ease. This book is a queer masterpiece and Varela’s prose is masterful. I didn’t want it to end.”
—Bryan Washington, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot

“A thoughtful deep dive into a gay Latino man’s return to his working-class town, where his alienation lies in wait. Alejandro Varela’s promising debut is filled with insight about the past that produced our wounds, and how, despite having answers to lifelong questions, it holds no redemption. Intimate and jarring.”
—Sarah Schulman, author of After Delores and Let the Record Show

“Alejandro Varela dissects the disease of suburban life in The Town of Babylon, a finely-crafted literary scalpel with two edges, one that cuts through the layers of a dying body politic and another that clears arteries blocking the way to the heart of personal and political health: community.”
—Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting

“The Town of Babylon marks the debut of a major talent. Alejandro Varela puts a new twist on the American contemporary novel dealing with immigration, identity, race and gender. His scope is wide, encompassing, and his vision of the ‘melting pot’ includes a generous portion of the various kinds of Americans that comprise the United States . . . The Town of Babylon made me consider pertinent questions that much contemporary fiction is too timid to delve into in a compassionate, piercing and unsentimental way. Varela’s marvelous achievement reminds me of the world of John Updike’s Rabbit Run and of the deeply troubled America in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.”
—Jaime Manrique, author of Latin Moon In ManhattanAlejandro Varela (he/him) is based in New York. His work has appeared in The Point magazine, Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Rumpus, Joyland magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and more. He is a 2019 Jerome Fellow in Literature and his graduate studies were in public health.1. SIDEWALKS

The alumni newsletter was sitting on my bed atop a small pyramid of neatly folded towels. It had a January postmark, but the glossy pamphlet remained crisp, no doubt due to my mother’s care. On the back, among a scattershot of exclamatory text, it read, “Mark your calendars, Class of ’97! Reunion this July! Check St. Iggy’s Facebook for updates!” After mulling it over for a couple days, I visited St. Ignatius’s alumni page this afternoon.

THE DAY HAS ARRIVED!!! 7 p.m. UNTIL ***WHENEVER***(JOE’S RISTORANTE CLOSES AT 11 p.m., BUT DRINKS AT MCCLAIN’SPUB & LOUNGE AFTER!!! LOL. YOLO! RSVP ASAP.)

I endeavor in life never to be anything more than defensively prejudiced—certainly not haughty—but this sort of unbridled use of capital letters andacronyms should have been omen enough to keep me home.

•••

Over the last twenty years, these reunions had fleeted through my mind on occasion, the way I might envision a free fall or planes crashing into build-ings, which is to say briefly and, at times, with a shudder. I feared, in those moments, the possibility of reviving the past, of slipping irretrievably into
its grasp—lamenting, obsessing. Something akin to speaking aloud a long-held secret on the verge of being forgotten. Better left forgotten. In a matter of minutes, all of this will change. Twenty years of abstention, of keeping the past where it belongs, will come to an end.

To complicate matters, I hadn’t packed anything appropriate to wear. Is there a standard attire for this sort of occasion? How does one dress fortheir past? More specifically, a past inside of a present-day Italian restaurant established in 1975, and since remodeled four times, once by each new
owner—Italian, Italian American, Puerto Rican, and most recently an immigrant from Kerala. The communist state of India, Kerala is arguably the healthiest and happiest region in the subcontinent. A state whose successes never seem to appear amid the popular images of Indian poverty, Indian elephants, Indian river-bathing, and Indian yogis. I know very little about India, but if I hadn’t just mentioned this about Kerala, I’d have been as remiss as everyone else.

Joe’s, the Italian restaurant, is six unformed, halfway-harrowing blocks from my parents’ home, the home of my youth. Six city blocks aren’t much by way of distance. In the city, every block is a microvillage worthy of recognition. Together, six blocks might constitute an entire neighborhood,
possibly two, each with its own abiding culture. Here in the suburbs, however, the block is a nearly inconsequential unit of measurement. Here, all movement is coordinate based: the corner of Main and East 6th or behind the Friendly’s or you know, the old yellow house with the POW flag? Distance is also measured in time: twelve minutes door to door or twenty-five minutes without traffic or I did it in under an hour cuz there were no cops. And there is no minimum distance for traveling by car. No one walks anywhere, at any time—especially if the stretch of land in question is a six-lane commercial corridor flankedby incomplete sidewalks and a coarse layer of crushed gravel whose low, Wild-West plumes of gray dust materialize at each step.

•••

The people in the cars zooming past me, if they have taken notice, assume I’m poor, homeless, high, or here illegally, and likely all of the above. If they’ve given me a closer look—fitted, dark green slacks; summery white linen long-sleeve button-down shirt open somewhat seductively to mid-sternum; brown skin—they might be confused. They might be telling themselves I’m lost or stranded. In their defense, I am the sole person standing on this narrow ledge of pseudo-sidewalk, which ends in about fifty feet. From here, I move onto a borderless tract of wispy grass that appears to have sprouted from the surrounding dirt or from one of the muddy microlagoons that licks its edges, like hair on a pubescent chin or on a dome of advanced age—the alpha or the omega. These anomalous moments of nature are proof that there was once another landscape tucked beneath this capitalist afterthought.

Everyone is racing. To or from a mall, I presume. To buy or return something. To eat, to drink, to bowl, to dance, to watch a movie, or just linger. Doesn’t matter if the mall is a short strip with four or five nearly identical, neon-emblazoned storefronts; a behemoth with multiple entrances, foodcourts, and endless parking; or a sprawling megaplex, as wide as it is gaudy, moated by acres of parking. Doesn’t matter. Everyone is eager to get there, which is of particular consequence to me because to reach Joe’s, the Italian restaurant, I’ll have to wait on the tip of this islet for a breach in traffic.

At least it’s summer. At least the dusky sky is a distracting swirl of pinks, oranges, and purples spreading upward from the horizon, as if there were afire in the distance. A fire that is more or less under control. At least.

It’s almost 8 p.m., and there’s a slow drip from my armpits. If I back out now, no one will be the wiser—I didn’t RSVP. I require only a modicum of temerity and a plan. The route home is simple: turn around, circumnavigate the archipelago of sidewalk islands, cut through one football field–sized parking lot, then camp out at the Applebee’s until my parents have gone to bed. Or I could head straight home now, admit defeat, and sit in front of the television set with my father, who’s probably going to die soon—not today, but sooner than later.

“We’ve excised all of the damaged portions of his large intestine. But his fatty liver and diabetes require care, beginning with a reduction in carbohydrates, salt, beer, and wine,” my father’s doctor explained in the waiting room, nearly three weeks ago. She had a rock climber’s steely frame and thematter-of-fact cadence of a small-town mechanic, which left us believing that everything would be okay for now, but one day, it wouldn’t be.

“Por favor, vente a casa. He listens to you,” my mother pleaded with me last week. “I tell him something, and he says, ‘We’re all going to die some-day,’ but when you say it, he listens.”

“I can come home this weekend.”

“In the hospital, he promised me he would try, but he’s already eating papa y arroz y esa carne guisada que le gusta tanto. He sneaks away to el Dominicano. Their portions aren’t for old people. Restaurant food is not healthy. And he’s not supposed to be driving.”

“Mom—”

“A few nights ago, tomó vino. There wasn’t much left, but he’s not allowed to have any wine. I can’t do it on my own. I have to go back to work, and my back hurts from helping him out of bed, off the toilet, in and out ofthe car. The doctor says it could be months until he has his strength again.”

“Mom, I said yes.”

“Oh, mi amor! Gracias! You’re so good to us. Will Marco come, too?”

“No. I told you, he has his work trip.”

“Oh! I forgot—”

“It’s fine. It didn’t make sense for me to travel with him. He’ll be busy.” After a brief pause and some audible breathing, my mother asked if everything was okay between us.

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Well, you know your relationship better than I do,” she said, with anomniscient tenor that was more irksome than comforting.

A small fissure in the traffic continuum opens up. I won’t have to sprint, but neither can I cross the six lanes at my leisure. There’s no median; the friable pavement is pocked with faint, atavistic yellows and whites that suggest it hasn’t been painted in years, lanes barely delineated one from the other,
enticing everyone to swerve by omission. I scurry across like a tense squirrel, lacking the blitheness of my youth, when I was one of a small gang who’d bisect these lanes on low-end ten-speeds, mindlessly returning with sharp words and empty threats the vitriol of the horns and hostilities speeding past.

I’m here.

The restaurant’s parking lot, an open-air grid of ten by ten, is halfway filled with gargantuan metal boxes, all of them recently washed and buffed, catching the twilight in their veneers. In this town, one’s face to the world is their vehicle. A sleek ride can effectively belie or, at the very least, undercut perceived inadequacies. It can make a shitty life interstitially magnificent. It’s been this way since I can remember. Rims, tinted glass, and speaker systems were the reason my friends had jobs in high school. A few traded respectable Jesuit universities far from here for used sports cars—bribes from theirparents, in order to avoid private and out-of-state tuitions. For a high school reunion, a car wash is as essential as a new outfit, a haircut, or weight loss.

The restaurant, nondescript and industrial in appearance, abuts a paint-ball arcade, which is next door to a pool supply store, which shares a lot with a window-siding manufacturer, which is across a narrow side street from a tile company, all of them empty and slatted in the same eggshell-colored vinyl. At the end of this bland chain of businesses is the red-marqueed Uncle Billy’s, the electronics store where we’d buy our TVs, VCRs, CD players, refrigerators, microwaves, and washing machines, and where my brother worked as a stock boy in high school, and then a salesman. It’s where he died.
Uncle Billy’s is run by Uncle Ikbir, who gives my parents the same under-whelming 5 percent discount he’s been giving them for the last twenty-odd years. Ikbir has a long, wooly beard and wears a marshmallow-white turban.When he first arrived in this country, he drove a taxi in the city. One night, a coked-out day trader wrote him a five-hundred-dollar check to drive him to the suburbs. Ikbir took notice of how much bigger and greener everything was out here. After dropping the passenger off in his ritzy village, Ikbir got lost and drove twenty miles in the wrong direction, until he happened upon our insignificant town. By then, the sun was coming up, and he could see that the houses were smaller, had ricketier fences, less grass, and were more densely laid out than those he had just seen in the banker’s hamlet, but they remained significantly more spacious and private than the fifty-unit apartment building in the city where Ikbir had been living. Not long after that fateful taxi ride into the suburbs, Ikbir picked up and moved to a nearby town. He brought his wife over from Pakistan some years later. A year after that, Uncle Billy sold him the store. According to my brother, Ikbir recounted this origin story every year as part of his staff pep talk during the holiday season. In the early nineties, Ikbir briefly considered changing the store’s name to Uncle Ikbir’s, but the US had just invaded Iraq because Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and he worried that no one would know the difference between the Middle East and Punjab, and that his name would be bad for business.

If I dawdle outside of Joe’s long enough, someone will walk past and recognize me, and I’ll be forced to go inside. I may do just that: wait until I have no choice.

This indecisiveness would have amused my brother. Don’t be such a chickenshit, he might have said. He switched from fag to chickenshit after I told him I was gay. This was typical of Henry; when I least expected it, he was a good big brother. In fact, when I told him I was worried about coming out to our parents, he came out to them instead—“to test the waters”—a couple of years before I came out to them. After a week, Henry told them he’d been kidding. “Mom was pissed, but dad thought it was funny,” he later explained.

My brother was the kind of person who could never muster the courage to ask for a raise or a promotion, who quit several jobs by simply not showing up, who never raised his hand in class, who refused to give simple explanations that would have otherwise extricated him from complicated situations, and who rarely defended himself when it mattered, but he had no problem attending his high school reunion. He didn’t stay in touch with many of the friends he’d had back then, but he longed for those years anyway. At some point after high school, which by all measures he’d detested during the actual living of it, nostalgia became his default emotional state. Until the day he died, he referred to that era, sincerely, as the “good old times.” As if his remembrances were palliative. My theory: the misery of his adulthood was an order of magnitude greater than the misery of his youth, and over time, less miserable somehow transformed into “good old times.” In fact, it rankled my brother that I didn’t recall our youth more fondly. As if my memories risked contaminating, or in some way invalidating, his.

“The problem is you think you’re better than everyone,” he said, the month before his heart attack. He’d said it to me dozens of times before, but this time, he was matter-of-fact about it, and he punctuated it with, “And you probably are.”

Better isn’t a fair or apt description of how I view myself. I don’t think I’m intrinsically better or more important than anyone else, but I admit that I consider myself . . . something. Correct, maybe. After all, I did the things we were supposed to do. I did my homework. I got good grades. I seldom
disobeyed my parents. I applied to college. I got into college. I went to graduate school. I got a job teaching at a university. I put down 25 percent for my small apartment. I don’t own a car. I buy my produce at the farmers market. I speak three languages well, and a few others so-so. I support a nationalized health service, alternatives to incarceration, and a tripling of the minimum wage. I use LED bulbs. I don’t cheat. I avoid high-fructose corn syrup, and I keep plastics out of the dishwasher and refrigerator. I turn the water off while I lather my hands. I consume media created almost exclusively by anyone other than cisgender, able-bodied white men. I apologize when I’m wrong and I try to do better. I vote for the Green Party in the primary and the Democrat in the general election. I wait for my husband to orgasm before I do.

I don’t, however, consider myself unique or better. I’m doing the bare minimum. And the bare minimum should have been enough, collectively speaking. It was meant to add up. Instead, here we are, in a gas-guzzling wasteland bereft of sidewalks but with a surfeit of old sports cars on cinderblocks tucked beneath blue tarps.

I might be wrong. About all of it. I often get worked up about these things and later realize that I haven’t left sufficient room for the fullness of humanity or for the consequences of history. It’s my way.

But I’m not always wrong.

The sound of tires inching over gravel perforates the silence. Another steel behemoth rolls into the lot and I realize that escaping will be more complicated from this moment onward.US

Additional information

Weight	11.6496 oz
Dimensions	0.8400 × 6.0000 × 9.0000 in
Imprint	Astra House
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09781662601996
ISBN-10	1662601999
Author	Alejandro Varela
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC045000, FIC011000
Subjects	suburbia, class, FIC011000, racial, New York, family life, immigrant, literary fiction, reunion, long island, Sacrifice, race, lgbtq books, satire, award winning fiction, hispanic american fiction, national book award finalists, hispanic american literature, incarceration, fates and furies, little fires everywhere, family life fiction, health, immigration, high school, small town, culture, sexuality, Recovery, marriage, relationships, parents, addiction, childhood, society, bipoc, drama, FIC045000, infidelity, father, humor, community, identity, Emotions