Preview of The City and the Pillar Summary:

The City and the Pillar is the story of a man who never outgrows the homoerotic longings of his first schoolboy crush. Bernard Dick has pointed out how neatly the book extrapolates the recursive themes of American literature seen in Cooper, Melville, and Twain, including the boyhood idyll, the mysterious call of the sea, the quest for the unattainable, and the taming of the frontier — in this case a cultural frontier. More specifically, the book is on the surface the familiar tale from the romance tradition of a search for something that is not really there at all. It is not so much that Bob fails to reciprocate Jim's feelings when the two finally meet again, nor even that he has neglected to pursue a parallel quest (although Jim has always thought of Bob as a twin who must inevitably be sharing his feelings). The fact is...