Stacey D’Erasmo: Love Among the Ruins (July 2008)

Stacey D’Erasmo argues that the novel of sexual identity is no longer, on its own, compelling.  Yet certain of the sexual identity novel’s tropes—the narratives of passing and of double lives, of desire stifled by circumstance and of discontinuous selves—remain compelling to contemporary writers.  D’Erasmo looks at work by Michael Cunningham, Jeannette Winterson, Colm Toibin, Monique Truong and others to explore how the architecture of the sexual identity novel has been recycled and transformed.