Idlewild

A BEST BOOK OF 2023 ACCORDING TO: NPR Vanity Fair The Paris Review * Vox

James Frankie Thomas's novel Idlewild is a darkly funny story of two adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship, refracting the traditional coming-of-age story through queerness, trans identity, and the early days of the social Internet.

Idlewild is a small, artsy Quaker high school in Lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence. It is during one of those morning meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers.

For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is a prickly, aloof rich kid who is obsessed with gay men; Nell is a shy, sensitive scholarship student who is obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond fiercely over being the only two openly queer kids at Idlewild and spend their waking hours giddily parsing everything around them for homoerotic subtext. Then, during rehearsals for the fall play, they notice and befriend two sexually ambiguous boys, Theo and Christopher. The pairs become mirrors of one another and drive each other to make mistakes that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.

Looking back on these events as adults, Fay and Nell, who haven’t spoken in 15 years, trace that fateful school year in alternating perspectives, recalling backstage intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, boisterous teenage performances of identity, and smutty fanfic written over AIM and a shared dial-up connection—as well as the events that were, ultimately, both their making and their unmaking.