The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $20.55

  The God in Flight is the deeply felt and brilliantly realized story of dangerous love between a professor and a student at Yale University in the 1880s. It is also a landmark accomplishment in gay fiction and a dazzling reinvention of the Victorian novel by a remarkable and audacious first novelist who spent eighteen years bringing her creative vision to the printed page. Central to that vision is Simion Satterwhite. Quick-witted and sublimely tactless, he battles his way through childhood and dreams of escaping from the mad superstition and abuse of his father, an alcoholic preacher in the mountains of West Virginia. With the help of a kindly teacher, Simion is able to flee to New Haven and qualify for admission to Yale. There he finds an aloof art professor, Doriskos Klionarios, also a man with a history - his mother, a Greek whore, sold him in infancy to a British lord. Brought up as something between a collector's item and a pet, Doriskos has grown into a wary and withdrawn man whose wild talent has not yet found expression. He spends his nights sketching his ideal of human beauty, with no real hope that it exists in the flesh. Then he meets Simion, who is all he ever wanted, body and soul - and more. Even though concealment is the rule for male-to-male attachments in that place and time, even though romances between teachers and students are more dangerous than dynamite, such blazing affinity cannot be concealed....