'I am sixteen. I am as old as the century' It is 1916. Vincent is sixteen, on the brink of manhood. Vincent is aristocratic & privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war & the city almost deserted of men. In that brutal summer, Vincent's beauty & precocity captivate two men: Marcel, some thirty years his senior, a writer & celebrated socialite; & Arthur, the twenty-one year old son of one of the servants, who is now a soldier at the front. Both relationships become love affairs of a kind
- of the mind or of the body. Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer & far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. All of these men will suffer, & Vincent will lose the last vestiges of his childhood innocence. In the Absence of Men is a stunning first novel: in its daring in representing Marcel Proust as a character, in the beauty of its prose & in its delicacy of feeling. It is a quite remarkable debut.