Men in their Passions

In this spare and elegiac novel, John Roman Baker traces the emotional aftermath of desire through a series of male relationships-each brief, each flawed, each formative.

Jean-Paul moves from the anonymous rooms of Paris to England, and then to Italy. The men he encounters are passionate, self-destructive, and haunted-like himself-by pasts that cannot be undone.

Written with understated lyricism and psychological precision, Men in their Passions is a mosaic of intimate dislocations: a quiet...