JD

Jonathan Ascher, a radical writer and cultural hero in the 1960s, has been dead for thirty years. When a would-be biographer approaches his widow, Martha, she delves for the first time into her husband’s papers. She finds journals that begin as a wisecracking chronicle of life at the fringes of the New York literary scene, Jonathan’s adventures in the sexual underground, and the social upheavals that led to his famous book JD. As Martha reads on, she finds herself in a long-distance conversation with her dead husband, fighting with him again about their rocky life together and learning about the unseen tragic drama in her own apartment that ended with the destruction of their son, Mickey. Learning about herself, finally, through her confrontation with a man who will not let her go, even in death. JD is a brilliant and harrowing view of a half century of the American experiment, acted out on a small stage by three people who cannot find a way—neither sex nor touch nor words—to speak their love for one another.

"An amazing novel: beautifully written, ingeniously structured, involving and dangerous. The two narrative voices here, a wife and a husband, are perfectly realized. Martha in particular is a remarkable character--I've never read anyone like her in American fiction. This is a chamber drama about one family, yet it's full of windows that look out on the wider worlds of the Vietnam War, New York literary politics, and the gay revolution. Mark Merlis is a major writer and this is his best novel yet."--Christopher Bram, author of Eminent Outlaws and Gods and Monsters , "An important novel that masterfully evokes the tensions and social upheavals of the 1960s and sheds a fresh and highly insightful light on gay liberation, family life, and American masculinity."--Trebor Healey, author of A Horse Named Sorrow and Faun , "Both strands of Merlis' novel--Jonathan writing from the past, Martha speaking to us in the present--are vibrant, tense and alive. Merlis has written a profound book about sex and identity and family, about the perils of artistic ambition, about radical longing and the changing social fabric of America. JD is a beautiful novel."--Towle Road , "Mark Merlis's beautifully controlled and heart-wrenching novel JD . . . is narrated by aging New York widow Martha Ascher, whose husband Jonathan died from a stroke shortly after their son Mickey was killed in Vietnam. Jonathan was a writer on the anarchist left who believed in 'an ecstatic blend of political and sexual liberation' and who spiced up his home life with nocturnal prowling for willing young men. . . . But the novel's tragedy lies in the relationship between Jonathan and Mickey, who meets his father's rebellion with a destructive kind of rebellion of his own. Mr. Merlis unravels Mickey's story with steely assurance and finely tempered prose. Like Martha, he is the victim of a man who 'preached an ideal he couldn't live up to.'"--Wall Street Journal , "Powered by stunning emotional, intellectual, and erotic complexities, JD is a trenchant portrait of a marriage and its heartbreaking casualties and, at the same time, something far more ambitious: a disquieting meditation on how and why America's best hopes went so stupendously awry during the 1960s and early 1970s. What emerges is an angry, loving hymn to a generation's failure to create the world we so passionately believed we longed for. There is no better novelist at work in our troubled country right now than Mark Merlis."--Paul Russell, author of The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

Mark Merlis is the author of the novels American Studies, An Arrow’s Flight, and Man About Town. His work has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.