Idlewild: A Novel

By James Frankie Thomas. The Overlook Press, 2023. 400 pages. $28/hardcover; $18/paperback; $16.20/eBook.

Nell and Fay first speak before the 20-minute meeting for worship that begins each day at Idlewild, a Quaker school in Manhattan. Nell, a bashful junior, has had a “golden retriever” crush on Fay for years, and she is flustered when Fay casually comments to her about how beautiful the morning’s weather is. The date is September 11, 2001.

Seventeen years later, Nell and Fay, now in their early 30s, reminisce on the profound year-and-a-half friendship that blossomed after their initial meeting. While the traumas of 9/11 and the Trump presidency bookend Idlewild, these events only tangentially inform the novel’s plot. Rather, readers are warned of a far deeper, more personal tragedy: that of the catastrophic end to the friendship between Nell and Fay, a friendship in which both are wholly seen as they begin to explore their queer identities.

Idlewild and its administrators are Quakers, but the students are a “motley mix of Jews and Buddhists and atheists and Jewish atheists and Buddhist Jews.” Thus, it is perhaps appropriate that the heart of Idlewild—the place where the most transformative character growths occur—is not so much the school’s meetingroom but its Peace Garden, an ivy-covered courtyard with a mural painted in a “nightmare orgy” of rainbow daisies, doves, and stick-figure children holding hands in a chain around the Earth. (You know the one.) It is in the Peace Garden that Nell and Fay drop the decorum expected of being in a “House of God” and play “Guess Who’s Gay” to suss out which of Idlewild’s other students are queer. It is in the Peace Garden that a student protest erupts over the firing of a teacher. It is in the Peace Garden that Fay intuits that kissing a boy “would be like kissing the back of my own hand.” And, later, it is in the Peace Garden that Fay begins to realize that she might actually be a boy and gay at the same time.

Like the Peace Garden itself, such self-discoveries are at the heart of Idlewild. We see the scant tools through which queer high schoolers can understand themselves when Nell and Fay obsess over the maybe-gay literary characters encountered in their English class. Was The Scarlet Letter’s Roger Chillingworth in love with Reverend Dimmesdale? Nick Carraway must have loved Jay Gatsby, right? School plays like Othello allow Nell, Fay, and others to enact these “what-ifs” by adopting surrogate identities, but these desperately earnest explorations also remind us of the struggle to know oneself in high school, especially as a queer kid.

While few of the novel’s characters identify as Quaker, Quakerism does at least offer Idlewild students a vocabulary for self-exploration. When, during a chorus rehearsal, Nell learns that she is not the only gay student at Idlewild, she describes the feeling like this:

I felt whole, but also part of something bigger than myself. Like one glittering facet on a spinning disco ball. I guess it’s what Quakers call the Inner Light. You could call it lots of things, but whatever it was, it was the opposite of the aloneness I’d felt a few minutes ago. I belonged.

It is through friendships that Idlewild’s characters learn to inhabit their own identities and bodies. Nell becomes comfortable with being a lesbian, though other characters struggle far more. Fay’s journey is so profoundly difficult that she literally cannot imagine her future self; she can only envision an “empty silhouette surrounded by a corporeal crowd.” Fay’s abject fear of losing a friendship in which she is fully and truly seen—even as she cannot see herself—propels Idlewild to its conclusion in a series of events that forever alter the lives of its protagonists.

In Idlewild’s epilogue, Fay observes that so many teenagers today are “kinder and gentler . . . [and], as far as I can tell, some flavor of queer.” I too think that this is the case. And this change is, in large part, because books like Idlewild, written by queer authors, have helped young queer people to see themselves in characters sharing the nuances and challenges of their particular identities. As a cisgender man, I too saw myself in Idlewild. I saw myself in a naïve gay boy manipulated into falling in love with a dangerous sociopath—a situation that I escaped, but, perhaps, if I had grown up with more representative queer literature, I might have avoided it in the first place. In helping me to see myself, even in a minor character, Idlewild reminds me of just how critical novels exploring young queer identities are today.

Idlewild is a beautiful, funny book. Its prose flows from the witty to the sublime, the characters are superbly developed, and chapters are increasingly fast-paced, breaking into a sprint by the book’s conclusion. Those on journeys of self-understanding—particularly queer readers—will gain much from this book. All readers will delight in the friendship between Nell and Fay and the subtleties that Quakerism might offer to individuals exploring their sexual preferences and gender identity.

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Trevor Brandt is a member of Chicago’s Fifty-seventh Street Meeting. He is also a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago and managing editor of Americana Insights, a nonprofit publication dedicated to American folk art.