Perfectly Good

I just finished A Perfectly Good Man, a novel by the gay British writer Patrick Gale, whom I discovered on one of my visits to London.

I’d previously read his book Rough Music, which I liked a lot. That one is a family story involving an adult gay son having an affair with his sister’s husband (revealed pretty early on, so this is only a semi-spoiler); his mother, who has early-stage dementia; a long-ago childhood vacation that became an incubator for parental adultery; a present-day return to the same spot, leading to a sweet and sexy love story between the gay son and a mysterious artist guy; and regular shifts in time.

A Perfectly Good Man moves back and forth even more—not only in time but also among quite a few characters. It’s another family drama, this time hinging in part on questions of faith and loss of faith, and is centered on the life of a minister, a married father of two, on the Cornwall coast, where Gale lives and most of his work seems to be set. It’s not as gay as Rough Music, but a peripheral character is a gay man, and the minister’s daughter, whose sexuality is kind of indeterminate throughout the story, ends up marrying a woman, which is nice and in fact one of the book’s pivotal events.

Gale’s strength is his mastery of structure, time, and perspective. A Perfectly Good Man (his most recent book) felt ever so slightly less compelling to get through than Rough Music, but darned if I didn’t close it pretty amazed at what he’d built and where he’d taken it. He even manages to make a unicorn reference work! (On that note, if you ask me what I thought of Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, I’ll tell you I found it a moving invocation on a momentous occasion, but I could have done without the rainbows.)