Set in the late 1990s, Many Are Invited starts as a sort of buddy story. The two male leads, Steve and John, both in their mid thirties, work for the phone company trying to resolve the Y2K problem of what will happen to the world’s computer systems when 12/31/1999 shifts to 01/01/2000. They become fairly close until John leaves the company and joins a dot-com. He becomes wealthy, meets his future wife, Mary, and lives a prosperous life. Steve stays in the same old phone company job, dates around without meeting a significant other, and develops such an envy of John’s life that Steve ultimately develops a tendre for Mary but doesn’t act upon his feelings.
This book is supposedly a retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and there are a number of mentions of Gatsby and other Fitzgerald characters, and there is even a Many Are Invited character nicknamed after Fitzgerald himself because of his very vague distant relationship to F. Scott. That said, the characters are not particularly likable. Steve is envious of John and always feels out-classed. The women are archetypal “good” or “bad” women without much substance. The more lush the body, the worse the personality.
The title, Many Are Invited, refers to an invitation to an open house party given by John and Mary as they settle into their first house. The story is fairly slow until the tragedy set up in the first few pages finally strikes at the open house. The denouement seems overly long in proportion to the rest of the novel, and the ending feels rather abrupt.
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Many Are Invited (Celestial Eyes Press, October 6, 2022) is available through:
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