Sid is twenty-five and on the verge of finding himself. Joan, thirty-eight, hovers between self-knowledge and despair.
John Clayton’s resonant and sensitive novel What Are Friends For? Portrays the private frailties that draw unlikely lovers together, and the gathering individual strength that ultimately pull them into separate lives.
They meet in an ice cream parlor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Joan works to earn tuition at a local college. Undone by fatigue and frazzled nerves, Joan notices the slender, long-haired boy bending over his books at a corner table, or watching her work, and she reads in his eyes a kindness that soothes her. For Sid, with a Harvard diploma and the world at his feet , Joan’s face reflects the strength and wisdom of an older woman.
They fall into bed and into a relationship that is stormy, tender, and rewarding. But their romantic interlude is brief.
Sid is twenty-five and on the verge of finding himself. Joan, thirty-eight, hovers between self-knowledge and despair.
John Clayton’s resonant and sensitive novel What Are Friends For? Portrays the private frailties that draw unlikely lovers together, and the gathering individual strength that ultimately pull them into separate lives.
They meet in an ice cream parlor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Joan works to earn tuition at a local college. Undone by fatigue and frazzled nerves, Joan notices the slender, long-haired boy bending over his books at a corner table, or watching her work, and she reads in his eyes a kindness that soothes her. For Sid, with a Harvard diploma and the world at his feet , Joan’s face reflects the strength and wisdom of an older woman.
They fall into bed and into a relationship that is stormy, tender, and rewarding. But their romantic interlude is brief.