Smile Please - Softcover

Keates, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099285169 ISBN 13: 9780099285168

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

Synopsis

At three in the morning, in a gay club somewhere in London's Bermondsey, Adam Killigrew comes face to face with Nemesis - wreathed in an unknown boy's devastating grin. Maybe it's just a question of smiling back? But life offers more complications for Adam, and for his lodger Theo, the black actor busy reinventing himself as an expensive luxury for mysterious Guy from Bayswater. Others are caught in the web: blue-blooded Daisy, muse and fixer, who needs to stay in control; Serena, her sister, and country wife to the perfect Jeremy; Frankie, the dancing divo with whom Adam falls in love; and sibylline Alice, the third sister, who knows all their secrets and one or two more.

This is a comedy of jaded city lives, of sex and secrets, of the urge to end the game. To dodge the Millennium and flee to the country. But can this smiling crew make their escape? With his unerring satirist's eye, softened by a wry indulgence towards human weakness. Jonathan Keates mixes the irony and compassion in a stylish, poignant and entertaining novel of post-Cool Britannia.

About this title

Review:

Adam Killigrew is 35, gay, and doles out money from Ethel Chauncey Wooldridge Foundation, "to Just Seventeen Samantha from Raynes Park who wants to be Darcey Bussell". He lives in Clapham with lodger Theo, a black actor, who is having a strictly circumscribed never-outside-the-bedroom affair with rich, urbane Guy. Adam's friend Daisy queers the pitch by introducing her new lodger, "the celebrated divo of dance" Frankie, who quickly becomes the new object of Adam's affections, while Daisy's sisters Serena and Alice provide differing takes on that bizarre existence that some people insist on perpetuating outside London.

In his second novel, Jonathan Keates penetrates the kind of educated, middle-middle-class circles familiar from Patrick Gale's work, although a closer parallel would be Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell, with its contrasted urban gay and village lives (and sure enough it gets a name check in chapter 2). The danger with this sort of novel is that the leading characters are, by their very nature, perfectly awful--the kind of bitter, not-quite-successful, over-educated, over-articulate, over-confident wine-bores and opera-snobs you pray you won't end up next to at a dinner party. But Keates lightens the burden with his witty evocation of the games gay men play in saunas, backrooms and on the streets, perfectly capturing the bittersweet lost moments of contact that could have been the one. Smile Please is at heart a thoughtful analysis of the unspoken--and unspeakable?--mismatch between sex, love and domesticity in contemporary queer London: it deserves to be read. --Alan Stewart

Review:

"Keates is an immensely elegant writer...with its wit, graceful contrictuon, snappy dialogue, Smile Please is a novel that Woody Allen might have written had he been a gay Londoner" (Independent)

"Always entertaining...sympathetic and absorbing" (Observer)

"Elegant, humane and highly intelligent" (Times Literary Supplement)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0099285169
• ISBN 13: 9780099285168
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336