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Rose is a copy editor, and Owen, the director of admissions at a private boys’ school.

Set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of the Aids epidemic, the novel recounts the lives of the Benjamin family parents Rose and Owen (both 52) and their son Philip (25). It explores the terrible secrets that families keep from one another, and the consequences of their discovery. The Lost Language of Cranes is David Leavitt’s first novel and was published in 1986. I was thinking every day how I had to change my life, how I couldn’t go on this way but I knew the more I thought that, the farther I was getting from where I thought I should have been.” While Leavitt's stories in Family Dancing were subtle and suggestive, his first novel is a muddle of callow insights written in an arrested prose style.”It was horrible, really, what I was feeling, the sense I had that I was running a terrible risk every minute of my life - risking my family, my career - but not being able to help it somehow just not being able to help it. There's also a disposable, and chronologically confused, sub-plot concerning a ""serious lesbian leftist,"" a young black woman disowned by her uptight parents. Though the outline suggests one of Leavitt's spare stories, he pads the book with the sexual histories of father and son, including set pieces on first sex, first love, first time at gay bar, etc. His son, whose romantic life resembles the bodice-rippers he edits for a living, began his public life as a homosexual in college, where he would stop people on the street and salt, ""Hi-I just wanted to let you know, I'm gay."" Essentially the story of Phillip's later love for one Eliot, with whom he engages in a constant ""orgasm-postponement battle,"" the novel also provides a self-pitying post-mortem to this rather ordinary affair.

Or, as he puts it, with the kind of self-loathing common to his generation of closet cases: ""Fag, fag, fag, your father is a goddamned fag."" For the past 27 years of a lackluster marriage, Owen, the director of admissions at a toney Manhattan prep school, has spent most Sundays in a gay porno theater, furtively exchanging gropes, strokes, and more. When Phillip Benjamin, a yound editor of pulp romances, finally tells his parents he's homosexual-his friends already know-his disclosure encourages the unexpected and painful admission from his father, Owen, that he too prefers to have sex with men. The hot young short-story writer Leavitt (Family Dancing, 1984) contrives a first novel that's pretty tepid stuff-a gay coming-out tale with a not-so-clever narrative twist.