The city, love, and other traps.
From author Cairo Smith comes a tender, sincere society novel for the 21st century, surging with a modernist romantic spirit and all the heartaches of youth.
Calvin Munn is a good man. He left his Iowa hometown to chase Manhattan dreams, dead-set on art school and an advertising career. Now, he stands on a Honolulu veranda, on the precipice of thirty and feeling like a kid all over again. Madeline Payne, his childhood friend, his muse, waits just feet away and yet beyond reach. How did he screw it all up this bad?
A decade earlier, Calvin meets Madeline just once, as a high school senior. From there, he sets off for New York, entwining himself in a complicated marriage with an Egyptian-American socialite who is hiding her double life from her father, Calvin’s boss.
Career turns, rich friends, and new heartaches all compound. Madeline, married to a rising country star, haunts Calvin as their lives thread together and apart again and again.
It may take a shock to finally end the pattern.
Current Affairs is a contemporary adult novel of youth and its end, of revels and storm clouds, tracing twelve years in the life of an ambitious young man, his wife, and the messes they make. It owes much to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and shares ground with Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
