A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love

In his thirteenth book, acclaimed poet, critic, and memoirist David Biespiel turns to the novel to tell a story about Houston that has few, if any, parallels in Texas literature.

It's the first year of the Reagan era.

Jon "Duke" Wain, a charmed 18-year-old growing up in Meyerland, Houston's historic Jewish section, who is the heir apparent to his family's generations of rabbis, finds a companion for drinking, drugs, and living wildly in Manolo Salazar, his gay best friend, who has grown up in Hispanic Gulfgate, heir to his own father's evangelical ministry.

On a Saturday night in September, in 1981, the night Nolan Ryan pitches his record fifth no-hitter at the Astrodome, the two scions light out for Galveston Island, then heading down the Texas coastline, intent on not returning home.

Binging among an assortment of dangerous revelers, Duke meets Caroline Cahill, a haunting young woman who turns out to be a runaway from West Texas, and whose mother Duke discovers he may know a troubling secret about. Confronted at the threshold of life and fate, Duke wonders if Caroline Cahill's story is the route to putting his birthright behind him. The answer will change his life.

A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Loveis about the tensions between ambition and faith, duty and desire, art and life—and about those whose lives must live with the consequences of choosing one over the other.