End of Story

Book excerpt: "End of Story" could be described as a sequel to E. M. Forster's "Maurice." But it is more than that. The saga begins on the eve of the First World War in 1914 and ends in New York during the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Many themes emerge: New York during the sexual revolution of the 1970s and AIDS, Princeton and Cambridge, Santa Fe and Brooklyn, plus a rich cast of Cuban and Hispanic characters, all woven together to form what might be called a history of emotional expression and social change. But most of all it becomes a happy-ending version of Edmund White's "Farewell Symphony," the story of intimacy and devotion tested over time. John M. Bowers is an internationally known scholar of medieval English literature with books on Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet. Educated at Duke, Virginia and Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he taught at Caltech and Princeton before settling at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and his lecture series "The Western Literary Canon in Context" was released by The Teaching Company. "End of Story" is his first novel.