This book is just brilliant! I am over the moon. Seriously. The writing is among the most beautiful I have read, and it is a rarity to find such a thing coming off press in 2016. I found it similar in style to James Baldwin's work, and the characters similar in depth. It wasn't until later in the book when I started to find find references to Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and then, upon finishing, I found out that Sarah Schulman has indeed been heavily influenced by Baldwin's writing.
The friendship between main characters, Bette and Earl, spans thirty years from the 1920's through 1950's and the reader is taken on a beautiful, intense journey as the unlikely pair struggle with their feelings, desires, and personal identities. The setting is as though Schulman was living it herself, and I couldn't have seen it more vividly.
The Cosmopolitans is a retelling of Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac, which I have not had the pleasure of reading. From what I have read on it, however, Cousin Bette is a story of violent jealousy, sexual passion, and treachery. Sarah Schulman's retelling includes all of that, as well as dealing with some very difficult issues that were not only true in the time, but still relevant today. ( )

I loved this book. It’s the story of two lonely people, one a white female who fled her small town life in Ohio and the other a black gay man who fled his family in the south. They’ve lived side by side in different apartments since they met. He’s a struggling actor, forced to take a job in a slaughterhouse. She has a mundane job as a secretary in an advertising firm. Their New York City story spans the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s and their friendship is responsible for their survival. If a story could be called “beautiful” that’s what I’d call this book. ( )

I really enjoyed this—an odd omniscient narrator book, based on Balzac's [Cousin Bette], but very engaging. I liked the characters' combination of extreme perceptiveness and extreme selfishness, which made for a neat kind of social-realism-on-the-couch storytelling. It was actually the perfect book to read right after Elizabeth Taylor, with the British drawing room transplanted to late-1950s Greenwich Village with some race relations thrown in. Schulman's epilogue was interesting too, talking a bit about Zola and dirty realism and literary movements.

The cover reminds me so much of a Dawn Powell book but I can't remember which. Maybe The Golden Spur.

I was sorry not to bring it home with me from the conference I was at in Orlando, but I was greedy and picked up too many galleys and couldn't quite see bringing a galley that I'd already read home again in my already overloaded suitcase. So I set it free into the wild of the Rosen Centre lobby, which was full of librarians this morning, with a note; hopefully someone else (who didn't pick up as many galleys as I did) will dig it. ( )