Talbott Street

By Hutton Hayes

Talbott Street explores love, death, and fidelity through the mysterious friendship of Nick and dying Johnnie R. Through flashbacks, reminiscences, and Johnnie R. (TM)s journals, the narrator pulls the reader through the gripping wake of a passionate friendship spanning twenty years.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0759618844
• ISBN13: 9780759618848
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: 1st Book Library
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The lyrical novel still lives!!!

Wow! When I sat down to read "Talbott Street" I was more than a bit concerned that the novel would be too dark for my typical summer reading. After all, it is a story told at the bedside of a banker-turned-poet dying of AIDS. And yet, it captured me, and my wife, immediately. The novel unfolds through a series of flashbacks alternating with chapters at the dying man's bedside. As he sleeps, his longtime friends tells us how they both came to this point. By using the dying man's journal entries, ditties and poems, and with some astounding dialogue, we slowly come to understand the twenty-year friendship. But it's a friendship with a twist since the narrator telling the story is straight and the dying man is gay - or bisexual. They meet in college, separate, are reunited five years later, remain together for a year in Indianapolis and then part under brutally difficult circumstances for eight years until the dying man asks his friend to return to help him die. I can't say too much more without giving the surprise away, but there is a love triangle (straight), a murder, and in the end, hope for redemption. But it's the language that makes the novel. Hayes has a knack for the poetical rendering and phrase, and in fact an appendix to the novel contains poems (I'm assuming written by Hayes himself)which are attributed to the dying man. Talbott Street is a bar, the place of a murder, a painting, a London address - and well, a symbol for change. A must read. A lyrical tour de force!!!