Godlike is his second novel. Set in the '70s, it's a story of Paul, a poet, husband, and father-to-be in his late twenties, and T., a teenage hustler from Kentucky. They meet at a reading and promptly fall in bed for a couple days. T. becomes the Tadzio to Paul's Auschenbach, the ...um...everyone to Paul's Genet.

The narrative, which switches between third and first person (in the form of Paul's sickbed journal entries), is enticingly, awkwardly poetic. Paul tells the reader that "it's important that you not like" T., but then, of course, rhapsodizes about him for another 140 pages. It was a time when youth was king, you see, and Paul understandably feels old, saddled with a wife and impending child about whom he feels ambivalent. (I tried to recall if I felt that old at 27. I don't think I did.)

T. becomes Paul's kept man, inhabiting a squalid apartment and drinking and using, all on Paul's dime. After managing to fall from everyone's good graces (and T. becoming entangled in a relationship with a schizophrenic girl), they decide to take a bus down south. Paul is so impressed (and frightened) that T. picked up and moved to NYC and is now prepared to pick up and leave NYC--it's as though being with T. lifts the weight and torpor he feels. And, of course, he's also afraid of T. leaving without him. So they go.

They wind up in Memphis, where they spend a lot of time drinking, taking pills, and fucking, and then go on to Florida and promptly split up. Paul's first-person journal entries, written in his early fifties while confined to a psych ward, alternately lament the loss of T and curse his existence. Paul believes that T. is dead. (He's not.)

Actions and thoughts have equal weight in Hell's writing. There are pages of sexual interludes between Paul and T., though the sex is not nearly as erotic as his descriptions of heroin in his superb first novel, Go Now. I found having to entertain Paul's tragic psychosis draining, and could have read an entire novel that didn't involve spending any time inside his head. It's depressing, as well, that he could remain so stubbornly narcissistic for his entire life. There's nothing sympathetic about either Paul or T., though both are clearly human. That's tricky to do.

What's trickier is effectively weaving two different perspectives into one narrative, and the weakness of this construction plays poorly against the beauty of Hell's writing. In an interview with Rick Moody a few years ago, Hell alludes to several separate pieces he's working on, and it seems as though he went and consolidated two of them to create "Godlike." I would have preferred to read the part of the book that was set in the '70s on its own.

Part of the frustrating beauty of Hell's writing is that he captures the volatility and the tawny glow of youth, ironic for a protagonist who feels old at 27. His romantic portrayal of the early '70s in NYC, of Paul's life--in flux, simultaneously narcotic and crystalline--is particularly resonant. I wish there had been more of it in the story.

You can read an excerpt of "Godlike" here.