Old love

Old Love is an honest and daring novel about the American family in our time, about shifting loyalties, about loss and rediscovery, about sexual initiation and the human hunger for intimacy. It is the story of Tommie and Frank Haas and their two precocious children, Helen and Brighton, and of Hal Chapin, a gay man who had briefly been Tommie's lover and who has taken a place at the center of the family constellation. The novel opens in a New Jersey suburb as the turbulent sixties are drawing to a close and finds the Haas children in the throes of adolescence - Brighton, sexually confused and already in analysis; Helen, just coming into womanhood. Hal Chapin, not ready to acknowledge his homosexuality, has entered into an erroneous marriage, and within the Haas household domestic fissures are beginning to widen into deep cracks. A road accident late on the night of Tommie's fortieth birthday brings on the eruption that will shake the family to its depths, scattering some of them across the country, and setting them all on their separate paths toward a truer understanding of the meaning of family.