2023 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (nominee)
A Vogue Magazine Best LGBTQ Book of 2023
James Frankie Thomas’s Idlewild is a darkly funny story of two adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship, in a queer, trans, and early-Internet twist on the Manhattan prep school novel.
Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers.
For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, and obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive, and obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond fiercely and spend all their waking hours giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext. Then, during rehearsals for the fall play, they notice two sexually ambiguous boys who are potential candidates for their exclusive Invert Society. The pairs become mirrors of one another and drive each other to make choices that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.
Looking back on these events as adults, the estranged Fay and Nell trace that fateful school year, recalling backstage theater department intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, smutty fanfic written over AIM, a shared dial-up connection—and the spectacular cascade of mistakes, miscommunications, and betrayals that would ultimately tear the two of them apart.
Genre: Literary Fiction
James Frankie Thomas’s Idlewild is a darkly funny story of two adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship, in a queer, trans, and early-Internet twist on the Manhattan prep school novel.
Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers.
For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, and obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive, and obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond fiercely and spend all their waking hours giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext. Then, during rehearsals for the fall play, they notice two sexually ambiguous boys who are potential candidates for their exclusive Invert Society. The pairs become mirrors of one another and drive each other to make choices that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.
Looking back on these events as adults, the estranged Fay and Nell trace that fateful school year, recalling backstage theater department intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, smutty fanfic written over AIM, a shared dial-up connection—and the spectacular cascade of mistakes, miscommunications, and betrayals that would ultimately tear the two of them apart.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"A thoughtful, bittersweet rumination on queer adolescence in post-9/11 America. At once caustically irreverent and deadly serious as only teenagers can be, Idlewild is a confident, heartfelt debut." - Gretchen Felker-Martin
"So smart, so funny, so outrageous, so scary, so bittersweet, and so heartbreaking, James Frankie Thomas's Idlewild is a huge, brilliant, coming of age omnibus of adolescent mischief, uproar, and friendship, of exquisite comedy and profound courtesy, of love and resentment, secret crushes and true confessions, all of it suffused with the most knowing and big-hearted insights of adult retrospect. Thomas's writing is utterly artful, the story utterly kinetic and headlong and beautiful - the whole thing kept me mesmerized from the first page to the last. Bravo." - Paul Harding
"Thomas' Idlewild is a crackling, blindingly funny, thrilling and poignant romp through queer youth, the early 2000s, 9/11 NYC, Quaker schools, and the maddening, heartrending, singular friendship between Fay and Nell that I will never forget. Thomas is a voice and mind we've been waiting for." - Sarah Thankam Mathews
"dlewild toes the delicate line between darkly biting and empathetic. It's loud and funny and raucous, and yet, it sneaks up on you. With truths about living in the 2000s, the searing pain of looking back, and the absolute madness of having a best friend, James nails the heartbreak of being a theater kid and the humiliation of growing up." - Kiley Reid
"Idlewild is an outrageously funny novel that is deeply serious about the joys and calamities of friendship. With rare skill and precision, James Frankie Thomas captures all the laughter, the tears, and the ever-evolving inside jokes that cohere between two people who have finally found each other in the strangest place imaginable. This novel made me want to call my oldest friends, only to realize that the numbers are all changed. Idlewild is a major novel - modern and singular. James Frankie Thomas has written a new novel of friendship for a new world. We're all better for it." - Brandon Taylor
"Idlewild is the funniest, most moving novel I've read in years, a story of youth and love in all its precocious glory. James Frankie Thomas channels a pair of brilliant, searching friends with precision (complete with research paper citations and fanfic), and invites the reader into its big, hidden heart." - Jess Walter
"So smart, so funny, so outrageous, so scary, so bittersweet, and so heartbreaking, James Frankie Thomas's Idlewild is a huge, brilliant, coming of age omnibus of adolescent mischief, uproar, and friendship, of exquisite comedy and profound courtesy, of love and resentment, secret crushes and true confessions, all of it suffused with the most knowing and big-hearted insights of adult retrospect. Thomas's writing is utterly artful, the story utterly kinetic and headlong and beautiful - the whole thing kept me mesmerized from the first page to the last. Bravo." - Paul Harding
"Thomas' Idlewild is a crackling, blindingly funny, thrilling and poignant romp through queer youth, the early 2000s, 9/11 NYC, Quaker schools, and the maddening, heartrending, singular friendship between Fay and Nell that I will never forget. Thomas is a voice and mind we've been waiting for." - Sarah Thankam Mathews
"dlewild toes the delicate line between darkly biting and empathetic. It's loud and funny and raucous, and yet, it sneaks up on you. With truths about living in the 2000s, the searing pain of looking back, and the absolute madness of having a best friend, James nails the heartbreak of being a theater kid and the humiliation of growing up." - Kiley Reid
"Idlewild is an outrageously funny novel that is deeply serious about the joys and calamities of friendship. With rare skill and precision, James Frankie Thomas captures all the laughter, the tears, and the ever-evolving inside jokes that cohere between two people who have finally found each other in the strangest place imaginable. This novel made me want to call my oldest friends, only to realize that the numbers are all changed. Idlewild is a major novel - modern and singular. James Frankie Thomas has written a new novel of friendship for a new world. We're all better for it." - Brandon Taylor
"Idlewild is the funniest, most moving novel I've read in years, a story of youth and love in all its precocious glory. James Frankie Thomas channels a pair of brilliant, searching friends with precision (complete with research paper citations and fanfic), and invites the reader into its big, hidden heart." - Jess Walter
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