This poignant and poetic debut novel brings together Sebastian and Oscar, two long-lost friends who have a chance meeting at a wedding, as they sort out their conflicting views on relationships, settling down, and, ultimately, what it means to be queer ... Though Sebastian and Oscar’s perspectives sometimes lack nuance and are at points hard to empathize with, in their juxtaposition readers will find a compelling exploration of the experiences of queer people from different generations as two modern-day gay men figure out whether they want to conform to traditional views of relationships and marriage or break free entirely.

Let’s Get Back to the Party’s opening decision to jam its characters into outdated and mutually exclusive gay roles—instead of exploring the overlap between them—sets up the book for an inevitable failure ... None of Oscar’s literary cruising is handled with any nuance or depth ... While a successful first-person point of view is a unique opportunity to interrogate a character’s interior world, in Let’s Get Back to the Party it cockblocks the novel from developing a political consciousness of its own beyond the wooden ideological dyad of its leading men. As Oscar’s internal monologues veer into offensive cliché and caricature, he becomes a monstrous hodgepodge of the worst gay men have to offer ... So what does it mean to be a gay man today? Let’s Get Back to the Party doesn’t offer any clear or compelling answers, but perhaps the larger issue is that the book’s fundamental question isn’t all that interesting. Who still believes in a world where one can talk about a unified, homogeneous gay subject? ... Unfortunately, the reader is given superficial characters slotted into a contrived plotline, resulting in a politically shallow book that devolves into utter nonsense.

Some readers may give up on the story in its early stages because Sebastian and Oscar appear unlikeable and are totally egotistical and absorbed with themselves. But after 50 pages, the story begins to gel better resulting in the reader investing a little more in trying to understand the viewpoints of Sebastian and Oscar as they mull over various facets of being gay. But their perpetual struggle to find meaning and connection in their own emotional struggles prevents the reader from appreciating that a larger percentage of gay people are happy and content in their lives than those who are not. The reader risks being left with wondering if the reason for their unhappiness is because they are gay or is part of a wider American obsession with happiness—the feeling that everyone has a right to be happy or, at least, feel happy ... The greatest weakness in the novel is that readers will find it difficult to develop an affinity with either of the two main characters, coupled with unrealistic plotting ... sometimes feels like a crossover between a self-help guidebook and fiction, particularly when Sebastian and Oscar get into their own style of self-analysis, but the plot is nevertheless engrossing and contains a good level of suspense. What is clearly evident is that Salih has the potential to be a good writer.

At the book’s core is an immense and encumbering question of what it means to be a gay man today, now that the identifier is neither a death sentence nor a stamp of substantive rebellion. But...the question becomes its own kind of constraint ... [The book] possess[es] emotional and historical heft only by association with tragedies not experienced by its central characters, namely the AIDs epidemic and...the Pulse shooting. On such terms, these events begin to feel like contrivances of plot; they must ennoble, provide perspective, as though queer history mattered only insofar as it embroiders the present, tells us how to be and who to vote for. It is harder, though, and perhaps premature, to address history that is fresher, less easily narrativized, such as the series of breakthroughs and regressions...that characterize our present moment. Salih’s book tries to do so by reading at times less like a novel than like a dialectic between Sebastian and Oscar, between the assimilationists and the liberationists. If there is a middle ground on this continuum, it is suggested almost exclusively by the novel’s supporting characters, two of whom exist as symbols, who help expose the tyranny of both narrators’ convictions.

The outpouring of praise and attention for this emotionally exacting novel is well-deserved. Not only because of the book’s raw, brilliant prose and the undertow of its storytelling—subtle yet forceful—but also because of the way the author deals with issues of representation. Salih refuses to sanitize what it means to be queer and to be human ... What makes the narrative so powerful is the way in which Sebastian and Oscar, deeply imperfect, both beg and dare you not to look away from the grittier picture of what it means to be a gay man in America today ... Salih seems to encourage the reader to find beauty in their flaws and humanness. He repeatedly offers us glimpses of the exquisite via the repugnant, especially the moments that explore the primal control of the body over the mind.

[This] searching, incisive debut novel finds two gay millennial men making sense of their place in the culture, the struggle and each other's lives circa 2015, not long after the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States--and not long before the shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub ... A contemporary American meditation on gay life, Salih's novel thrums with details and moments that keep the material from ever edging toward the schematic.

We flash between the hot, sticky months of summer 2016, when Sebastian marvels at the ease with which the younger generation proclaims their sexuality, and memories of his adolescence, when as an insecure boy he found solace in the beauty of paintings and sculpture. His only friend was skinny, quiet Oscar Burnham, another boy questioning his sexual identity ... Zak Salih’s first novel is a gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now. He imbues Sebastian and Oscar with complexity and flaws, two men unsure about the path their life is meant to take. Salih offers a cleareyed exploration of the sometimes fine line between friendship and romance, and how past slights can rear their heads in the most unexpected ways. A raw and captivating debut.

The shifting landscape for gay men in America animates Salih’s heartfelt debut. ... There’s a varied cast, though many of the support players come across as generic: an uncle disapproving of him expressing his gay identity, the loving but conflicted mother, and so on. But Sebastian’s and Oscar’s twinned dilemmas add fascinating complexity to the goings on. The party may be changing, but reasons for celebration remain, as evidenced by Salih’s passionate evocation.

Two childhood friends reconnect in their 30s with life-changing consequences ... There’s a deep tension between the two that’s sexual but also political: Neither can entirely stomach the life the other has chosen. But to Salih’s credit, the narrators’ personalities don’t fall into tidy moral demarcations; Sebastian, who isn’t adventurous, dangerously pines for one of his 17-year-old students, and Oscar, who has a robust sex life, might just want a steady relationship if he’d admit that to himself. An insightful examination of two of the many ways gay men present themselves in contemporary America.