Fellow travelers, by Thomas Mallon

I read this 2007 historical novel in order to discuss with a friend who is helping produce the opera based on it that will be performed in Madison WI.  The time is the early nineteen fifties and the McCarthy era red scare is in full swing.  In addition to going after suspected Communists in the State Department, Joe McCarthy is also rooting out suspected homosexuals as security risks.  Hawkins Fuller, a dashingly handsome State Department official, happens to run into a young recent Fordham graduate named Tim Laughlin.  This encounter will change Tim’s life as through Fuller he gets both a DC job and becomes Hawkins’s lover.  In this closeted era, a career can be destroyed by even innuendo.  But Hawkins seems to live a charmed life despite his lack of caution.  Others in this well-written story are less fortunate.  In large part, this is Tim’s story of his sexual awakening and the tortured  conflict this causes in light of his devout Catholic upbringing and beliefs.  The period is brought to life as characters whose actions resonate down into present day are depicted – Nixon, for example, and Roy Cohn, Trump’s lawyer who would die of AIDS.  Recommended.  355 pp.