The Country of Blue

A contemporary novel of intersecting lives ranging from Chicago to rural Alabama, from Silicon Valley to Manhattan, The Country of Blue is the story of twenty-seven-year-old Ian, a Chicagoan working for an online magazine owned by a Silicon Valley billionaire with a penchant for younger men. After the two become sexually intimate the young writer, enamored of his newly-lavish lifestyle, loses his scruples, and a great deal more, on his way to becoming, as a foe describes him, the Machiavelli of Sex. In Part One the narrative shifts between present and past while exploring Ian's glorious ups and downs, including a passionate but violent adolescent romance that shadows his life as it forms his behavior. Others are drawn into the vortex of his stormy life, including the renowned poet, Armony Foley, and the reclusive novelist, Fiona McKee. As the story ranges through time there are encounters with the Circuit (a gay network of parties and fundraisers), the casual sex lives of Generations X/Y, recreational drugs, mercantile greed, the tribulations of the poet and the making of the mythic American Dream. Part Two follows the protagonist's search for meaningful redemption following his disgrace, leading to the pivotal encounter with Armony and the novel's core, the country of blue. Here too the narrative moves forward and back in time, offering as a foil to Ian's bleak circumstances a redemptive gift in which the structures of art become entwined with gay marriage as explored through the prism of Armony's past and the words of his mysterious lover: "In the country of blue I'll marry you."