A routine story of family secrets and conflicts, it's only the gay theme that lifts it above the run-of-the-mill. Well-written, but not particularly engaging. I suspect I would have enjoyed it more if it had been about Niles and Frasier ... ( )

Set in the 1980s against the backdrop of a swiftly gentrifying Manhattan, The Lost Language of Cranes tells the story of twenty-five-year-old Philip, who realizes he must come out to his parents after falling in love for the first time with a man. Philip's parents are facing their own crisis: pressure from developers and the loss of their longtime home. But the real threat to this family is Philip's father's own struggle with his latent homosexuality, realized only in his Sunday afternoon visits to gay porn theaters. Philip's admission to his parents and his father's hidden life provoke changes that forever alter the landscape of their worlds.

How do we understand each other; what language do we use? Leavitt's characters are so very real and his sympathy for their lives is profound. One of the best gay novels. ( )

New York, early 1980s. Owen and Rose have lived most of their married life in the same apartment but now they need to decide if they can afford to buy it - if not, if they can afford to rent elsewhere. He's working in admissions at a prestigious boys' school, she is a copy editor. The uncertainty and indecision over the apartment has placed them and their relationship under a lot of stress and when their son Philip comes out to them, cracks in the relationship become all the more evident. For Philip, coming out seems a logical step as he's feeling so happy in his relationship with Eliot, but the reactions of his parents are not quite what he expected or craved for.

I have read this book several times before and still love it - the writing is wonderful. ( )

I wasn't impressed with this one. Leavitt has a tendency to tell us what's happening, then take three steps backward to tell us what led up to that happening, filling in the even earlier backstory along the way. The result is that you read 10 pages to find out: Owen is walking somewhere. His wife is home working (and they have to either buy their apartment or move, and they have a grown son, here's what his apartment is like, and here's what they talked about when she had lunch with him one time and then she took a cab ride but that was another day because now we're back in the apartment hearing about how her husband was gone when she woke up and now it's page 14 and she's working, like she was on page 4, and she's going to go for a walk.) Then we meet the son and his lover, but now we're going back 3 weeks to read the story of how they met.

Novels don't have to be completely linear, but I began to feel like I was floundering around inside this one, trying to find the story, trying to figure out if anything was actually going to happen that related to the situation the author chose to begin his novel with. (It does, but by the time it did I cared less than I had at the beginning.)

Some of the dialogue seems contrived. Phillip sounds like a bad parody of a mental health counselor: "I miss her. I feel very sad about it." And some of the conversations between father and son toward the end of the book, I just found impossible to swallow, which in turn made the relationship seem false. Since that relationship was a pivotal part of the novel, it was disappointing to say the least. ( )