Paul Nolan

Paul Nolan is Harlow´s fifth novel, first published in the early eighties. It is a serious but entertaining book about the male dilemma at the height of the gender revolution, as FELICE: A Travelogue is a book about a woman being jack knifed out of her old life into a new one at this same time in history.

Excise two short episodes in Paul Nolan´s early life and he would have had a very different and much less puzzling life. He is a man of whom his best and oldest friend, Matthew Donatis, remarked that he was someone who had danced through life on the head of his cock.

The dance is not a merry one, but it brings him eventually and inevitably to a bizarre week that climaxes on its final night when the music stops but the dance doesn´t. It becomes a shocking gambado played out before an invited audience of intimates and strangers on the lawn and around the pool of his upscale home.

Paul Nolan is the amazing story of a man, his wife, his three very different children, his oldest friends, his damaged love-child and the go-go dancer (the time is the late 1970s) his 22year-old son brings all the way back home to Vancouver after an encounter in Cleveland. What happens to Paul then is something some men may easily recognize. Many women will see their own experience in Kate, Paul´s wife.

But the novel is also the story of a life-long dialogue between two men who from childhood could not fathom how to play the hand experience had dealt them.

Paul´s week is a clear, fascinating and profound unraveling of the times of ordinary people living extraordinary lives betrayed by knowledge too raw and dangerous to admit or remember until an intimate death upends their carefully fortressed lives.

Click here to read an excerpt.