Tempting Fools, by Darien Cox

[Ulysses]

Tempting Fools
By Darien Cox
Published by the author
Four stars

I really liked this book, but had forgotten why I’d picked it up when I got around to reading it. The pleasure of reading it really lay in the author’s ability to embrace the formula of the gay romance novel and make it different, make it meaningful, and make it emotionally authentic

Kurt Varley is not a man I’d care much about normally, and I suspect the author designed him that way. He’s thirty-six, divorced for a year, and the father of almost-eighteen-year-old twins. He was blindsided by the collapse of his marriage to the girlfriend he got pregnant in high school. He is feeling adrift, seemingly shunned by his children and also by his widowed father, Jasper, who refuses to accept his help. To top it off, Kurt’s attempts at rejoining the dating pool have been, to say the least, unproductive.

So, a morose still-young straight guy who has messed up his life without quite understanding how it happened. Yeah, not my notion of a guy who’s going to get much sympathy from me.

Yet, it is the spark of the unexpected that suddenly makes Kurt interesting. In the middle of a disastrous date with a woman who deserves better, Kurt is taunted by a younger man at a seaside fun park—a young man who not only seems to know stuff about him, but also stirs a long-buried attraction to men that Kurt hasn’t felt since middle school.

There we are: the forgotten bisexual. OK. I’m on board.

What ensues, however, is not a strictly by-the-book romance, although the author (himself a mysterious character) does abide by the rules (including various required emotional hurdles and physical intimacy at almost exactly the halfway point in the narrative). Kurt, as much of a suburban-dad dullard as he at first appears, emerges as a gentle guy, sensitive and thoughtful, who has simply been stuck in a life that he didn’t realize was not what he wanted. Like many men in our culture raised to be straight fathers and husbands, he’s lost sight of his inner self, and it’s the disturbing allure of the younger man—with the unlikely name of Orion Starr—that begins to shake him up.

Orion is an even more complex character. In some ways he’s less emotionally troubled than Kurt, but his childhood was an appalling mess, until a good foster mother and—surprise—Kurt’s father Jasper Varley stepped in to set things right. Kurt’s distance from his military-correct father, who himself seems to have had trouble with communication and emotional sharing, makes his unexpected acquaintance with Orion explosive and problematic. It is the author’s exploration of this complicated dynamic between the old man (i.e. my age) and the two younger men who look up to him that gives the book such a rich mine of emotional material.

Darien Cox doesn’t try to make moral absolutes in this story, preferring to dwell in a kind of gray area that forces his characters to think carefully about everything they feel and do. He also makes his readers begin to grasp the notion that the same person can behave very differently to different people—even if they’re all people he loves.

It's messy, and sometimes upsetting, but it feels authentic. It feels surprisingly real.