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Late in the Season
Jonathan Lash, a successful composer, is staying alone at the summer cottage he shares with his lover Dan when he meets Stevie Locke, the eighteen-year-old girl who lives next door
254 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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97 people want to read
About the author
Felice Picano
99 books211 followersFelice Anthony Picano was an American writer, publisher and critic who encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 5, 2024
SPOILERS AHEAD ********************
Hmm I don't know about this one. The story, although incredibly evocative in terms of place and setting just felt completely far fetched. A gay man in a relationship of 8 years suddenly has sex with a young 18 year old female neighbour while his partner is away because you know, his partner plays around so it's fair right. The female character is annoying and overdone in terms of emotional hysterics and hyper sexuality whilst the main character and his partner are unlikable and typically bitchy queens into interior decoration and "making love expertly for hours"!! Picano sure plays to the stereotypical tropes in this one and it just didn't do it for me. The only saving grace was the setting of Fire Island.
Hmm I don't know about this one. The story, although incredibly evocative in terms of place and setting just felt completely far fetched. A gay man in a relationship of 8 years suddenly has sex with a young 18 year old female neighbour while his partner is away because you know, his partner plays around so it's fair right. The female character is annoying and overdone in terms of emotional hysterics and hyper sexuality whilst the main character and his partner are unlikable and typically bitchy queens into interior decoration and "making love expertly for hours"!! Picano sure plays to the stereotypical tropes in this one and it just didn't do it for me. The only saving grace was the setting of Fire Island.
March 17, 2013
While doing a bit of housecleaning (which included picking out books to donate), I found a copy of Felice Picano's 'Late in the Season.' I do not toss out Felice's books (since most of them are signed!), and was engaged from the first page to re-read this intimate novel of a gay man's friendship with a young woman in the early 1970s.
The Fire Island beach community is making its exodus as summer ends, including composer Jonathan's lover Daniel (who's off the London to direct a series of films). Hoping to enjoy time alone to compose a new musical, Jonathan is surprised to encounter Stevie (Stephanie), the young daughter of his wealthy island home neighbors. Her panic attack during a fierce rainstorm leads her to take shelter with him.
What transpires defies most gay literary conventions, yet the prolific Picano manages to include lush details of the flora and fauna, rich descriptions of the thoughts, physicality and desires of his characters, and a real sense of intimacy. The clever insertion of opera and folklore references weave into the story nicely.
So many new writers think they need speed, action, and they fear in-depth descriptions in their prose.
'Late in the Season' provided some great unintentional homework by example; how to be emotionally and descriptively expansive while remaining true to an intimate story.
The Fire Island beach community is making its exodus as summer ends, including composer Jonathan's lover Daniel (who's off the London to direct a series of films). Hoping to enjoy time alone to compose a new musical, Jonathan is surprised to encounter Stevie (Stephanie), the young daughter of his wealthy island home neighbors. Her panic attack during a fierce rainstorm leads her to take shelter with him.
What transpires defies most gay literary conventions, yet the prolific Picano manages to include lush details of the flora and fauna, rich descriptions of the thoughts, physicality and desires of his characters, and a real sense of intimacy. The clever insertion of opera and folklore references weave into the story nicely.
So many new writers think they need speed, action, and they fear in-depth descriptions in their prose.
'Late in the Season' provided some great unintentional homework by example; how to be emotionally and descriptively expansive while remaining true to an intimate story.
March 8, 2021
Get Luke Evans in this movie and McKenzie Davis
January 7, 2024
My introduction to Felice Picano, as part of a Kindle edition of three of his early novels, the others being Looking Glass Lives and The Lure, which I’ll read later. Jonathan, one half of a gay couple of eight years’ standing, is left on Fire Island in September (‘late in the season’) when his lover Dan goes to Britain to prepare a series for the BBC. Stevie, the teenage daughter of their immediate neighbours, comes by herself to the island to ponder her future: does she want to marry the boy her parents have more or less picked out for her, return to college, concentrate on a career? She and Jonathan renew their slight acquaintance, become friends, and start an affair.
I really enjoyed the atmosphere of Fire Island, the light, landscape, customs, wildlife, weather, and I was envious of Jonathan and Dan’s beautiful house. However, I didn’t quite believe in the love affair; which is not to say that a gay man – not entirely happily in an open relationship – might not abruptly be drawn to a young woman: a seismic shift in his (and his lover’s) way of experiencing the world, after all, and therefore the stuff of drama. Maybe I just didn’t care for the direction the plot was taking: it seemed almost to play into the hands of those who affect to believe that anyone gay hasn’t yet met the ‘right’ opposite sex partner to take them out of their homosexual funk. I began to suspect the narrative was autobiographical, or possibly weirdly expressive of a piece of buried wish-fulfilment on the author’s part. If so, I assumed that Jonathan was a rather self-adoring self-portrait (witness the scene where Stevie comes upon him, tanned and naked in bed, and is overcome with desire), with the writing of music – he is a composer – substituted for that of prose. Felice Picano’s afterword confirmed that the book was autobiographical, but that he had been the Stevie figure who attempted to come between a pair of established gay lovers. Curious, I thought. I doubt even Tennessee Williams would have attempted this type of artistic subterfuge in quite this form; so that perhaps it accounts for my nagging impression of unreality.
Late in the Season has an additional layer of poignancy, since it was first published in 1981, just as the AIDS epidemic was about to break over the heads of gay men like Jonathan and Dan; I had the same feeling of unease following their story as I do reading about Edwardian youth prior to the Great War or silent film stars in late twenties Hollywood unaware of the death blow talking pictures would represent for some of them.
I really enjoyed the atmosphere of Fire Island, the light, landscape, customs, wildlife, weather, and I was envious of Jonathan and Dan’s beautiful house. However, I didn’t quite believe in the love affair; which is not to say that a gay man – not entirely happily in an open relationship – might not abruptly be drawn to a young woman: a seismic shift in his (and his lover’s) way of experiencing the world, after all, and therefore the stuff of drama. Maybe I just didn’t care for the direction the plot was taking: it seemed almost to play into the hands of those who affect to believe that anyone gay hasn’t yet met the ‘right’ opposite sex partner to take them out of their homosexual funk. I began to suspect the narrative was autobiographical, or possibly weirdly expressive of a piece of buried wish-fulfilment on the author’s part. If so, I assumed that Jonathan was a rather self-adoring self-portrait (witness the scene where Stevie comes upon him, tanned and naked in bed, and is overcome with desire), with the writing of music – he is a composer – substituted for that of prose. Felice Picano’s afterword confirmed that the book was autobiographical, but that he had been the Stevie figure who attempted to come between a pair of established gay lovers. Curious, I thought. I doubt even Tennessee Williams would have attempted this type of artistic subterfuge in quite this form; so that perhaps it accounts for my nagging impression of unreality.
Late in the Season has an additional layer of poignancy, since it was first published in 1981, just as the AIDS epidemic was about to break over the heads of gay men like Jonathan and Dan; I had the same feeling of unease following their story as I do reading about Edwardian youth prior to the Great War or silent film stars in late twenties Hollywood unaware of the death blow talking pictures would represent for some of them.
March 24, 2016
Late in The Season by Felice Picano
The book is set in Fire Island, on the Pines; more precisely the community of Sea Mist, in the early 1980's. Not aware of the AIDS epidemic, the book focuses on three people: A gay couple: Jonathan Lash and Daniel Harpin; and a confused teenager, Stephanie (Stevie) Locke.
It is after Labor day and Stevie has an identity crises. She feels trapped in her routine high society life; hates becoming a wife to a her rich suitor, Bill Trevney, and dreads going back to Smith College for her sophomore year. She asks for the Family's cottage keys on Sea Mist, where she hopes to sort out her life.
Jonathan Lash is a successful composer, who is in the middle of writing the score for The Lady and The Falcon, his first work that will go directly to Broadway. He's been "married" to Daniel (Dan) Halpirn, a successful T. V. director who away in London for a month directing a BBC series. Both men are at the peak of their careers, but their relationship is NOT monogamous: they've both had several affairs.
Enter Stevie, who on her first night at her parent's house on Fire Island is scared to death by a storm, and ends up seeking refuge at "The Lover's Place," as she calls the residence occupied by Jonathan and Dan. When she wakes up next morning and sees Jonathan's beautiful body, she has an orgasm.
After this revelation, which is a first for her, she's on a mission: to bed the beautiful lover, now that his boyfriend is out of town. She succeeds, but in her new "relationship" she realizes that she has found the answer to her quest: "all she would have to do was to follow her ideal, and the rest would follow in time, a man or a family, or something else--friends, a career, doing something useful." p181. As she tells her stalker, Matt: "If you have a dream, you should follow it." p. 180
Picano tells us in the afterword that the novel is inspired by an affair he had: "Like the one in the novel, it was a triangle, and, like the young woman in the novel, I was the third party intruding into a marriage. Yes, I was Stevie--not Jonathan."
The novel is a page turner and reads fast and easy. It was a pleasure to read and I recommend it to anyone who's ever been in a love triangle......
The book is set in Fire Island, on the Pines; more precisely the community of Sea Mist, in the early 1980's. Not aware of the AIDS epidemic, the book focuses on three people: A gay couple: Jonathan Lash and Daniel Harpin; and a confused teenager, Stephanie (Stevie) Locke.
It is after Labor day and Stevie has an identity crises. She feels trapped in her routine high society life; hates becoming a wife to a her rich suitor, Bill Trevney, and dreads going back to Smith College for her sophomore year. She asks for the Family's cottage keys on Sea Mist, where she hopes to sort out her life.
Jonathan Lash is a successful composer, who is in the middle of writing the score for The Lady and The Falcon, his first work that will go directly to Broadway. He's been "married" to Daniel (Dan) Halpirn, a successful T. V. director who away in London for a month directing a BBC series. Both men are at the peak of their careers, but their relationship is NOT monogamous: they've both had several affairs.
Enter Stevie, who on her first night at her parent's house on Fire Island is scared to death by a storm, and ends up seeking refuge at "The Lover's Place," as she calls the residence occupied by Jonathan and Dan. When she wakes up next morning and sees Jonathan's beautiful body, she has an orgasm.
After this revelation, which is a first for her, she's on a mission: to bed the beautiful lover, now that his boyfriend is out of town. She succeeds, but in her new "relationship" she realizes that she has found the answer to her quest: "all she would have to do was to follow her ideal, and the rest would follow in time, a man or a family, or something else--friends, a career, doing something useful." p181. As she tells her stalker, Matt: "If you have a dream, you should follow it." p. 180
Picano tells us in the afterword that the novel is inspired by an affair he had: "Like the one in the novel, it was a triangle, and, like the young woman in the novel, I was the third party intruding into a marriage. Yes, I was Stevie--not Jonathan."
The novel is a page turner and reads fast and easy. It was a pleasure to read and I recommend it to anyone who's ever been in a love triangle......
July 17, 2018
Beautifully written romantic novel
It’d been awhile since I’d read one of his novels. I’ve enjoyed everything of his I had ever read. This was so well written it’s like a work of art.
It’d been awhile since I’d read one of his novels. I’ve enjoyed everything of his I had ever read. This was so well written it’s like a work of art.
September 27, 2025
I’m sick of certain classic works being lauded and described as gay literature only for the story to heavily contain the author’s homophobic heterosexual conversion fantasy. First Gordon Merrick’s trash and now this. And gay male readers just sitting there and tolerating this bullshit. The radical lesbians would’ve raged over such a potrayal in lesbian books and I envy that their community predominantly has this no-nonsense attitude towards this homophobic agenda being pushed that sexuality is fluid and how it’s actually super progressive if gay media are filled with M/F relationships too and how the longtime homosexual character can actually be “cured” by sleeping with the right person of the opposite sex. Just what those conversion therapy believers are saying. A review in this website already affirms this agenda by saying how it can be “believable” for a gay man to be sexually attracted to a young woman. Fuck off. It’s sinister how every shops and sites that sells this book writes the plot summary by describing Jonathan as a gay man too like fuck no he’s not. Bisexual people wants to distance themselves from the gay label because of their attraction to the opposite sex so why not use that? Why market this book/Jonathan as gay when it’s just gonna make readers believe that gay people can be made attracted to the opposite sex.
This marketing of a media to be catered towards gay men only to be filled with not only straight sex and relationships being centered, but also using a conversion therapy rhetoric and fantasy is just so repulsive and homophobic. I also saw another dumbass comment about how this book validates the homophobic agenda that “labels are not important”. Fuck no. Homophobic people are not gonna make the gay attraction that we have been persecuted for centuries back into becoming “the thing that does not have a name” just because the postmodernist pendulum wants to maintain the heterosexual hegemony under the guise of “sexual liberation”. Again, if this was the intention of this book, to fetishize an absurd and “exotic” situation in which an 18 year old neurotic hyper sexual straight girl is able to turn a longtime homosexual into a heterosexual, this book should not have been promoted as gay literature. Just so insulting.
Anyways, Ethan Mordden is the only real homosexual authors of this time period that I trust because he gets the fundamental difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals on a social, political, and cultural landscape and he understands that the people in the community who has a proximity to the heterosexuals does not share the same fabric that exclusively homosexuals are in. Goated.
This marketing of a media to be catered towards gay men only to be filled with not only straight sex and relationships being centered, but also using a conversion therapy rhetoric and fantasy is just so repulsive and homophobic. I also saw another dumbass comment about how this book validates the homophobic agenda that “labels are not important”. Fuck no. Homophobic people are not gonna make the gay attraction that we have been persecuted for centuries back into becoming “the thing that does not have a name” just because the postmodernist pendulum wants to maintain the heterosexual hegemony under the guise of “sexual liberation”. Again, if this was the intention of this book, to fetishize an absurd and “exotic” situation in which an 18 year old neurotic hyper sexual straight girl is able to turn a longtime homosexual into a heterosexual, this book should not have been promoted as gay literature. Just so insulting.
Anyways, Ethan Mordden is the only real homosexual authors of this time period that I trust because he gets the fundamental difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals on a social, political, and cultural landscape and he understands that the people in the community who has a proximity to the heterosexuals does not share the same fabric that exclusively homosexuals are in. Goated.
March 9, 2024
This has to be one of the most curiously challenging books to review I've come across. I encourage people to view the goodreads summary as I had assumed from the one on the book that it would be a book about an unlikely friendship--which it is, but in a very unconventional way. This is far more about troubled relationships, troubled minds, and troubled hearts. It's about the soul searching we do at different times of our lives and the perspectives others can give us when we invite them into our lives.
Where I run into mental challenges is that I'm not entirely sure I've ever been as unsettled to bristly about a set of characters and still found the work compulsively readable. I came away with a bit of a sense of inconsistency in Jonathan's presentation of attitude between his first few scenes and 'after the storm' in which he seemed both to be far more gentile in mind and spirit and less like the 'problem' in his current relationship. That aside, it was a very bizarre and unsettling thing trying to figure out where as a reader you wanted each character to go. What sort of revelation and path would make the best novel, be the most noble, or the most significant for them, or maybe even give them a little taste of their privileges.
Reading the afterward, seeing this as an experiment of the author to capture a moment in time and life made the pieces click a bit better into place. I think if the reader goes in with an open mind, and looks for a story of the tornado of thoughts and emotions that come along with big changes in life, that they might be quite invested. However it does challenge the concept of labels and there is some outdated language that would have not been at least as abrasive in the decade this was set that might take someone out of a moment.
Where I run into mental challenges is that I'm not entirely sure I've ever been as unsettled to bristly about a set of characters and still found the work compulsively readable. I came away with a bit of a sense of inconsistency in Jonathan's presentation of attitude between his first few scenes and 'after the storm' in which he seemed both to be far more gentile in mind and spirit and less like the 'problem' in his current relationship. That aside, it was a very bizarre and unsettling thing trying to figure out where as a reader you wanted each character to go. What sort of revelation and path would make the best novel, be the most noble, or the most significant for them, or maybe even give them a little taste of their privileges.
Reading the afterward, seeing this as an experiment of the author to capture a moment in time and life made the pieces click a bit better into place. I think if the reader goes in with an open mind, and looks for a story of the tornado of thoughts and emotions that come along with big changes in life, that they might be quite invested. However it does challenge the concept of labels and there is some outdated language that would have not been at least as abrasive in the decade this was set that might take someone out of a moment.
December 31, 2020
An engaging in that small sweet spot after Stonewall and prior to the specter of AIDS or are of life prior to Stonewall, where life could be lived, if not perfectly, at least without the paranoias of both eras. This novel went a directions I didn't expect, though delivered what I've come to expect from Picano - a worthy read.
September 8, 2011
A wonderful novel filled with love and tenderness between and amongst gay men.
September 13, 2012
Quick fun read. Not his best book but good.
January 28, 2015
It was a little fluffy and predictable but Felice Picano's writing is so beautiful, it didn't matter.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews