Busy Body, a novel.
Busy Body is a darkly comic New Narrative-style künstlerroman about a troubled, idealistic, and erudite young gay man searching for love in the mercurial and often brutal world of men, finding disappointing and sometimes dangerous sex rather than the relationship he longs for. The harsh realities of city life are intensified when he falls into an orchestra pit and nearly dies, forcing him to confront the specters of homophobic abuse, fear, and self-loathing. The story unfolds in five distinct episodes against the backdrop of five different disasters, beginning in post-9/11 New York City and ending twenty years later in the Yucatán at the impact site of the meteor that wiped out nearly all life 60-million-years ago. Wry and incisive reflections on video-art, theater, French cinema, vegetarian-socialism, monogamy, gay marriage, and the political possibilities of queerness punctuate his journey amid the book’s greater themes of love, loss, trauma, and healing.