The Last Man At The Gym

A literary novel about a 52-year-old gay man waking up to a life he can no longer afford to live — and the quieter, smaller, more honest one he builds in its place. Daniel Reyes-Whitfield has been performing the same life in West Hollywood for fifteen years. The 5:55 gym sequence. The eleven-step skincare routine. The Sunday brunches at Felix with Trevor, Reece, and Andrew. The dating apps on the second screen of his phone. The 1BR on Crescent Heights he can no longer quite afford. The four-hour drive to his sister in Bakersfield he hasn't made in three years. Then a stranger at the cable cross looks past him. A new trainer named Marcus tells him, in passing, that he has a great work ethic. The HOA assessment lands for fourteen thousand dollars. And one Wednesday evening, half-drunk on Sancerre, Daniel deletes eighteen dating apps and renames the empty folder Old. What follows is not a triumph. It is the slow, hilarious, sometimes unbearable dismantling of a life — the friend group that erodes by inches, the cringe poetry workshop he quits after two sessions, the Friday relapse that costs him whatever pride he had left, the apartment that goes on the market, the small bungalow in Altadena with bad floors and a lemon tree planted in 1973. It is also, quietly, the building of something else: a sister who has been waiting fifteen years, a mother smaller than he had remembered, a neighbor named Rita who brings over a foil-covered plate, a friend who finally sends the four-word text that says everything. For readers of Andrew Sean Greer's Less, Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy, the tenderness of Patrick Nathan, and the patient interior precision of Garth Greenwell. The Last Man at the Gym is a novel about being the oldest man in the room and pretending not to notice. About the hundreds of small decisions, made over fifteen years, that turn a life into a performance. About the small, unromantic, unshowy people — a sister, a brother-in-law at a kitchen sink, a trainer with a tattoo that says okay, a quiet friend who says drive safe across a parking lot — who are, when you finally let yourself notice them, the people who have been holding your life together all along. It is funny in the specifics — the eleven products organized in their order of application, the way Trevor pronounces cortado, the small mortifying poem Daniel writes about a tomato. It is tender in the larger movements. The humor is how Daniel survives. The tenderness is what he is surviving toward. Pete Cossaboon writes the kind of literary fiction that takes a person and slows time down around them, so the reader can see the small operations by which a life is being lived. The Last Man at the Gym resists the boyfriend ending. It resists the neat reconciliation. It resists the sentimental epiphany. Daniel does not have one big realization. He has a hundred small ones. This is a novel about waking up at fifty-two. About the marmalade jar on a counter that becomes the only real thing in the room. About a wide pale Kern County light that has been there, in California, all along — and what it costs, and what it gives back, to finally live somewhere it can come in. An upmarket literary novel for readers who have been waiting for fiction that takes middle-aged gay men seriously — without rescuing them, without pitying them, and without giving them a tidy bow.