Casanova 20: Or, Hot World

by Davey Davis

A novel about art, desire, and mortality, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World follows a young man isolated by his extraordinary beauty and his strange friendship with an older painter.

Cursed by an extreme and unrelenting beauty, Adrian has drawn the frenzied attention of adoring strangers since childhood. As a twenty-nine-year-old in New York City, he spends his days drifting between affairs with women (and occasionally men) who provide him with everything he needs, from spending money to luxurious vacations to even, once, a mini yacht. With this generosity comes a dangerous possessiveness that often puts him at risk of much worse than heartbreak. But as people begin removing their masks in the spring of 2021, Adrian’s aimless sexual availability is interrupted by a shocking discovery: he is no longer beautiful.

Across the country, Adrian's best friend and companion, Mark, a world-famous painter, has returned to the family home in rural Northern California. He's faced with his own horrible revelation: he’s dying from the same mysterious disease that will soon take his mother and sister. Despite the depth of their platonic romance, neither man reveals his fate to the other. Feeling as if he’s disappearing from sight, Adrian searches for answers among his thousands of lovers. In a race against his failing body, Mark becomes obsessed with watching fifty-two VHS tapes of unknown origin, left to him by his sister, before it’s too late.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Contemporary, Adult, Literary Fiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 2025

Reviews

[Remi · Rating 3 out of 5]

there’s something hypnotic about this book. the story moves like a fever dream—quiet, languid, but full of tension underneath. adrian, cursed with otherworldly beauty since childhood, has lived a life defined by others’ obsession and desire. i found his sections especially compelling: they’re filled with a sense of panic and melancholy, particularly once the pandemic hits and masks make him feel invisible for the first time in his life.

the novel contrasts adrian’s life with that of his best friend mark, a painter facing his own mortality, but i was more drawn to adrian’s side of the story, which feels richer and more emotionally charged. there’s something unnerving yet poetic about watching someone who’s been objectified all his life suddenly experience anonymity.

the author writes beautifully about beauty, desire, and identity in an age where being seen and being desired can be both power and prison. it’s a slow, introspective read, and though not everything lands evenly, it lingers long after the final page.

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i feel like this is a book i'd come across in an art museum.

*thank you to Catapult for the ARC*

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Casanova 20 follows Adrian, a Dorian Gray-cum-Jesus figure whose unending beauty lands him in an ever-revolving door of fucking, being leered at and just as often, stalked—all of which he swallows with a strong dose of apathy. It’s only when his beauty begins to fade (twink death as prophesized by Oscar Wilde) that Adrian begins to feel things more fully, including the grief he experiences watching his good friend, the older and renowned painter Mark, die of an undisclosed illness. As the two men’s narratives weave into one glistening wound of consciousness, Adrian searching for the cause of his fading beauty and Mark facing his own revolving door of vomiting, diarrhea, and tortured sleep, Casanova 20 resists categorization and insists above all else upon its own beauty.

[Kyle C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adrian is handsome and not much else. Ever since he was a boy, he had been the entrancing object of attention to women and men alike (twice abducted, and apparently, never traumatized by the experience). Once an adult, a high-school dropout in NYC, he could rely on an entourage of so-called "friends", a cadre of swooning admirers, to find jobs, apartments, doctor's appointments, etc. And yet he is not particularly interested in these friends, rarely responding to messages, or asking them questions about their life, barely remembering names—until the Pandemic, when suddenly everyone is masked and scared, and his indefinable charisma no longer has the same bewitching power. Adrian decides to move in with a famous artist, and maybe a true friend, who is dying of cancer (not that Adrian knows; he has no interest in his friend's art, let alone health). Casanova is a morality tale—much like The Picture of Dorian Gray—about a man too handsome, too vain, and as a result, totally amoral. His whole life he trades on his good looks, instrumentalizing people for short-term gains, and he must learn to value people.

The writing, like Wilde's own Dorian Gray, has wit but can be a little stuffy and pompous. There are definitely moments of clever humor:

By the time he was eighteen, Adrian could summon it in order to resemble the kind of man that women he encountered were most attracted to: for blondes he was stoic; scientists mysterious; writers witty; baristas exciting; leftists like-minded; cops uninhibited; teachers romantic; mothers gentle; mothers rough; strippers capable; bakers soulful; social workers horny; divorcees easy; HR administrators nice; bisexuals boyish; line cooks indulgent; cashiers funny; optimists charming; readers erudite; CEOs implacable; musicians clever.

I found myself cackling when I got to "line cooks indulgent". I also loved the following sentence:

The only time she had been with a man was during the Bush administration, though she had been a lesbian then, too.

Sometimes the prose was a little too artificial and contrived, such as this almost meaningless sentence:

Arturo was always there but after the funeral he hunted instead of haunted,

And some similes fell flat:

Surprisingly, the room smells like almost nothing, maybe a single Parliament filtered through postnasal drip.

It requires a bit of mental labor to divine what a Parliament cigarette might smell like with a post-nasal drip—a simile that perhaps is only evocative for a very niche slice of the already shrinking smoker population.

Overall, it is a novel that sparkles. It's sometimes a little too cloying, and the narrative structure of this modern-day fable (narcissist comes to moral realization) was a little too hammed up.

[Ygraine]

feel abt this much as i felt abt paul takes the form of a mortal girl, not because they are stylistically or substantially all that similar as far as i can remember, but because there's smth glassy and artificial abt them that makes me v conscious of myself, like my breath and fingerprints are smearing the surface of the text as i read.

[Kayleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why aren’t more people talking about this masterpiece? Over and over, Davis needs few lines to perfectly capture an event or a feeling. I’m in love with how the first chapter “Before” reads like the start to a completely different book than the one I just finished. I’ve spent so much time with these characters, and I’m eating up every little thing they do—because Davis writes so beautifully so many little mind-blowing moments.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’m realizing i don’t like reading/watching things that include COVID as a major plot point. but i do love a slutty novel

[Hannah H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s definitely a deeper meaning to this book, but I was so unbelievably bored that I don’t even care.

[Amani · Rating 1 out of 5]

In Casanova 20, Mark, one of the two main characters, spends his final moments on his deathbed watching a couple dozen movies that are essentially pointless and lacking substance.
This book is even more pointless and lacking substance than all of those movies combined.

[Léonie Camille Chainé · Rating 5 out of 5]

DAMNNN

[sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

i cried at the end... won't someone give Adrian a straightforward explanation to his question😭😭😭😭💔

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

What if you were unbearably hot for your entire life and one day, without warning, it stopped? One half of Davey Davis' third novel, Casanova 20 explores one straight man's grief over this conundrum, while the other side plays the story of an older gay painter watching his mother, sister, and then himself succumb to an unexplained but fatal illness. These two men's lives braid into each other while the world experiences the mass upheaval and grief of the covid pandemic. Davis is, as always, sharp and unexpected, even as they dig into themes around sex and illness that have infused their prior novels X and the earthquake room. Personally, I can't wait to see how some readers will misread the characters in this one — particularly the question of Adrian's sexuality and how to categorize the intimacy between the two leads. As with everything else in the novel, the answers are both straightforward and mysterious. It turns out twink death can happen to str8s, too.

[sofi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a perplexing read, one which I’m either too dumb or blind to grasp. + the pandemic remains a sore spot to me, which dampens my appreciation for the masks/vaccine-related segments of the book. Segments whose politics remain confusing at best

Most reviewers seem to have been captivated by Adrian, which I do get. He’s lovely, has been since he was a child, a tragedy in and of itself. And yet, he’s at his most beautiful when Mark is describing him; and Mark, the whole of him, is what I resonated with. A lot.

Hot world, whatever it may mean. The ghost of Arturo and its hunting of the narrative. The ghost of the AIDS Crisis and its hunting of Mark’s perception of sex, which Adrian is free from. The friends and the friends (italic). “My mother used to say that an accused man is desirable […] You might want to think about that”, which I don’t get. I am so perplexed. I am so sad. I need the author to explain it to me as if I’m five

[Steve Schaeppi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks to Goodreads for the ARC.

The premise of this novel is interesting, but I found myself quickly distracted by the stylistic choice of using block paragraphs and italics for dialogue. Because of these two devices, the time jumps can be very confusing.

The word choice is also distracting, as I needed to often look words up, as not even context clues could help me (words like desiderata, liminalities, insouciance, sputum, interstitial, bolide, and eroteme to name a small percentage).

The figurate language often feels like it is achieving the opposite desired effect, and overall, I'm not sure what I was supposed to walk away with after reading this.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not sure what to do with this novel. In some ways I hated it and it made me uncomfortable to read. In other ways, I loved it and the writing lured me in so much I read it in two sittings. The synopsis undersells the depth of this one. Not an easy read, but glad this was recommended to me.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this book a lot better than the book itself. 2.5 stars rounded up to 3 because I pushed through and did really enjoy the last 50 pages or so.

[Gainze · Rating 3 out of 5]

forgettable.

[Glenn Ingersoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very beautiful story. I loved it!

[Steven Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

difficult to pin down or warm to or understand, sort of beautiful in its meandering remove

[Blake Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out great. I thought the story would be more about Adrian and his journey to learning why he is no longer beautiful and maybe a few more lessons learned in that.

[Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

HOOKED in the first act, especially that first chapter... such a simple topic described beautifully and with depth. But my interest degraded as the story evolved. Solid 3 star.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huh..........

[Made Linear · Rating 3 out of 5]

felt like how reading did in 5th grade

[ladybug · Rating 4 out of 5]

i cant believe he watched all those films without logging them on letterboxd

[amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5