The Garden of Lost and Found

I wanted to read this book because Ron Powers said in the NYT that although Dale Peck is a good writer this is a bad book. Mr. Powers is wrong. This book is a brilliant, poignant, mediation on life in New York City as lived by the kind of people Mr Powers clearly hasn't spent much time with. I have and Peck has captured each with perfect pitch. Additionally - and I hope not offend anyone here - this is not "gay literature" which I take to mean stories about being gay. This is the story of a deeply complex young man and the all-too-human people in his life. This is a classic and should be read by everyone interested in serious literature. Plus, there's a great plot twist in the end!

The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck was a compelling story told through the perspective of a young working-class white Midwestern gay man who unexpectedly inherits from his estranged mother a valuable but dumpy mixed-use building near the World Trade Center in 2001 New York, and with it her complicated relationship to a black family that have their own ties to the building. A tall tale that dabbles in family secrets, HIV, and race in the city.The narrator character is simultaneously the most frustrating and most rewarding aspect of the novel. Right from the in-media-res prologue, his deteriorating health and self-destructive tendencies first shroud the more lucid and chronological underlying plot in a veil of hallucinations and half-baked fancies, then lead to painfully bad decisions. But getting to know and love this messed up guy the way the other characters do is the greatest charm of the work.The book does a good job of employing New York City—specifically Manhattan in 2001—as a major character in its own right. It's been done before but here it's done very well, and as someone who spent a few years in the city a while ago I found it both fresh and nostalgic.Recommended with content warnings for suicide, AIDS stigma, racism, & the narrator's latent transmisogynist baggage.