It’s the first year of the Reagan era.

 

Jon “Duke” Wain, a charmed 18-year-old growing up in Meyerland, Houston's Jewish section, who is the heir apparent to his family's generations of rabbis, finds a companion for drinking, drugs, and living wildly in Manolo Salazar, his gay best friend, who has grown up in Hispanic Gulfgate, heir to his own father’s evangelical ministry.

 

On a Saturday night in September, in 1981, the night Nolan Ryan pitches his record fifth no-hitter at the Astrodome, the two scions light out for Galveston Island, then heading down the Texas coastline, intent on not returning home. 

 

Bingeing among an assortment of dangerous revelers, Duke meets Caroline Cahill, a haunting young woman who turns out to be a runaway from West Texas, and whose mother Duke discovers he may know a troubling secret about. Confronted at the threshold of life and fate, Duke wonders if Caroline Cahill’s story is the route to putting his birthright behind him. The answer will change his life.

 

A novel about Texas that has few, if any, parallels in Texas literature, Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love is about the tensions between ambition and faith, duty and desire, art and life—and about those whose lives must live with the consequences of choosing one over the other.

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"David Biespiel brilliantly captures the endless energy and humming danger of youth, the way a single wild night can feel the passage of our incomprehensible past to our unknowable future. A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love is as smart, as funny and as searingly honest as the two young writers at its hard-beating heart. I gobbled it up, like a B-side of The Savage Detectives, like a thinking-man's Dazed and Confused."

— Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of The Angel of Rome

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"This is a classic American tale and a damn good story. Every sentence radiates in the dazzling lyric style David Biespiel has wholly made his own. Reading about Duke and Salazar’s unforgettable night in Galveston as they try to escape their religious fates into transcendence, readers will marvel at the literary slight of hand, seeing what the boys do not; they will never really light out for “somewhere, out there." It is a measure of its worth that A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love casts Duke as a contemporary Huck Finn, looking for something more and possibly discovering it.”

— Whitney Otto, New York Times bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt

 

“Some novels you casually date and others are a quick ride to the courthouse. I fell hard for A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love and its two young poets, the scion of a Rabbinic family and the Chicano son of a charismatic radio preacher, in pursuit of their own Texas. Excited by the molecular friction of unconsolidated possibility, escaping home like Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell carving out a place of freedom founded on poetry and debauchery, Duke and Salazar speak in the holy dialogue of reinvention, where a running joke can become a religion, and every fight, a prayer. It reminded me how much a year can hold, how much magic, how much creation, and how diffuse its potential becomes when we try to touch it. David Biespiel’s writing is spacious, cool and loose. The lands of south Texas and Galveston Island and the oil-slicked mainland shores are depicted with such a beautiful and barometric ambiance that the power of a place to shake loose its people is never in doubt. Still, his characters thrive between action and imagination, throwing raw psalms against the open sky."

— Vanessa Veselka, National Book Award long-listed author of The Great Offshore Ground

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"In this beautiful debut novel from poet Biespiel (Republic Café), an 18-year-old budding writer tackles questions of faith and filial duty in 1981 Texas. Jon Wain, known as “Duke,” takes a road trip with his buoyant best friend Manolo Salazar from Houston to Galveston. Along the way, Duke and Manolo drink beer, smoke a joint, argue about baseball and literature, and speculate about their futures. Duke, whose rabbi father is a prominent community leader, feels alienated from his devout family. Salazar, in turn, is discouraged by his preacher father from joining the Army. The best scenes involve the friends’ dialogue as they each sort out the difficulty of being their own man (“You think you’re in the moat. You’re not.... You don’t get outside the castle, man,” Salazar tells Duke). The trip along the Texas coast also involves an ex-girlfriend, a funeral, and a provocative young woman named Caroline, with whom Duke has a memorable encounter on the beach in the middle of the night. Biespiel contrasts young Duke’s propulsive energy with lyrical reflections of such events as a boozy beach party (“I was thinking that this whole atmosphere was a holy music, the notes flying up around my body like the red-beaked gulls floating overhead in big circles”). Readers will fall in love with Biespiel’s world of wonder and yearning."

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

 

"To grow up in Texas with the name Jon Wain likely makes being nicknamed “Duke” inevitable. So it is with the narrator of Biespiel’s novel, who ponders desire, literature, and his best friend, Manolo Salazar, as he looks back on their youth. Much of the novel follows the two friends over a handful of days in 1981, when they're 18, as they travel to the beach. Duke is well aware of their differing backgrounds: “Him, the oldest son of a broadcast evangelist. Me, the only son of the Grand Rabbi of Houston.” There’s also the matter of Salazar being gay, which Duke addresses about a quarter of the way through the book as it prompts him to rethink the ways he might have been unwittingly cruel to his friend. “It was like I had taken a strange drug and needed to arrange my mind and balance my feet,” he thinks after learning of his friend’s sexuality. But ultimately, the bond between the two endures. As Duke tells another character late in the novel, “We were born seven days apart, in February, 1964….We got made under the same sky.” Salazar will soon head to boot camp, which his father isn’t happy about. Both men have a lot on their minds, including whether or not they will take up their fathers’ respective religious positions. They’re also fond of discussing literature and following the exploits of Nolan Ryan. The novel’s second half introduces more characters, including a reactionary Vietnam veteran and a young woman to whom Duke is drawn—and who may have a secret connection to Salazar. It’s a largely satisfying novel, even if Salazar sometimes comes off as the more compelling of the two lead characters. A heady, thoughtful novel about two heady, thoughtful friends.

— Kirkus Reviews

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“A novelist is a failed short story writer,” Faulkner warns readers, “and a short story writer is a failed poet.” Award-winning poet David Biespiel, however, has engineered a trifecta of all three forms in his clever, amusing new release, A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love. Biespiel stakes out the no-man’s land between the short story, novella, and novel with a beautifully poetic narrative of two youthful friends, polar opposites, rambling through a bumpy passage into adulthood." 

— Lone Star Literary

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"Hailing from a long line of rabbis, 18-year-old Jon “Duke” Wain is expected to study the Torah but instead indulges in debauchery and recreational drugs. After he befriends a gay teen named Manolo Salazar, the two decide to run away from their homes in Houston. As they journey down the Texas coastline, Duke meets a mysterious young woman, who makes him question everything he thought he knew." 

— Alta Journal 

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A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love

SFA Press

2023

 

 

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