All the World Beside

January 29, 2024
Conley turns from the homophobic Baptist upbringing of his memoir Boy Erased to 1730 Massachusetts for a finely tuned debut novel about a queer love affair between a reverend and a doctor. Rev. Nathaniel Whitfield bonds with his parishioner Arthur Lyman when the latter treats Nathaniel’s frail younger child Ezekiel for an unknown illness. While the forbidden love story of the two men is at the core of the narrative, its scope and depth comes from the empathic and complex treatment of the other family members, including Nathaniel’s daughter, Sarah, who in 1765 receives letters from Ezekiel referencing an estrangement between the siblings that he seeks to heal. Conley’s prose is slightly formal but also direct and rhythmic, as in the opening lines, written from a young Ezekiel’s perspective: “The shore of his mother, her warmth sheltering his infant body from the cold. The shore of his sister, pressing her nose on his.” An author’s note on Conley’s research into 18th-century clandestine gay life offers welcome context to Nathaniel and Arthur’s bewilderment and guilt over their undeniable love. This is a potent chronicle of an underexplored era in queer history.