The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual: A Novel

A reporter's cherished past collides with his mentally ill millennial son's anguished attempt to claim his own season in the sun in this striking new novel about the rapids of the 21st century. Richard Leviton is an aging romantic, twice divorced, with visions of literary grandeur. Beginning in the 1980s, a golden age of magazines and a period of unmatched freedom in Los Angeles, and continuing through the convulsions of the 2010s, Leviton faces a harrowing crucible of circumstances—romantic chaos, home loss, cultural transition—all while attempting to anchor his son Philip's precarious security. Meanwhile Philip, coming of age, intermittently homeless, and yearning to retrofit his existence into a generation he believes had it all, begs to experience his father's LA, the essence of which he's convinced lives embodied in Leviton's eternally youthful longtime editor Bailey Kavanagh—perhaps the only woman to ever love Richard Leviton. Both prequel and sequel to the author's Signal Hill, which Kirkus Reviews called "what might have happened had Nathanael West lived on and been even more talented," the linked episodes comprise one bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy journey through a personal past so seductive the protagonists nearly stay there, until they can't.