Showing Smile Please by Jonathan Keates

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