Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers is a difficult book to place in one genre. It isn’t quite focused on the relationship of Hawkins Fuller and Timothy McLaughlin enough to count as a romance or “LGBTQ” book. Its undoubtedly rooted in its setting (you can practically smell the cigars and highballs wafting to your senses straight from the shady backrooms of 1950’s D.C.) yet the historical events seem too incidental to the plot to claim it as historical fiction. It’s like very meticulous window dressing. It is, undoubtedly, well written so maybe literary fiction is the nebulous category it was going for?

Difficult as it is to label, Fellow Travelers is certainly and affecting work. The relationship between Fuller and McLaughlin seems doomed from the start, less from the homophobic culture of 1950’s America than from their inherently incompatible natures (a fancy way of saying Hawkins Fuller is a profoundly shellfish and condensing man incapable of having a real relationship with anyone). Nevertheless, it’s interesting to watch their relationship unfold over the years. Though this all takes place in the shadow of McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare following fast on the heels of the Red one, being discovered is not these characters’ primary impediment, it’s Fuller’s jaded and cold personality. Indeed, throughout the story several characters pick up on the men’s relationship to no great or lasting effect. Overall this makes for a more interesting story in my opinion, I was pleasantly surprised to find the whole book wasn’t just these two men worrying and fretting and trying to cover up their relationship and their natures.

Though the plot flags somewhat in the latter third of the novel, the ending is appropriately wrenching and seems a fitting end for this story. Ultimately both characters don’t really change, only lean more into their defining characteristics, perhaps a fitting theme for a novel set in such a repressive and conservative era of American history.