We Could Be So Good

Nick Russo grew up poor in Brooklyn and fought his way into a reporter's job at the New York Chronicle in 1958. He is stubborn and driven, and he has little patience for the people who were handed their lives. Then Andy Fleming, the owner's son, drifts into the newsroom without much enthusiasm for being there.

Andy is sweet, scattered and rich, and Nick fully expects to dislike him. Instead the two become friends, and soon after they share an apartment. Small domestic habits pile up between them: cooking, gifts of flowers, a stray cat they take in. Somewhere in all that, the friendship becomes something neither of them has a word for.

This queer historical romance plays out in Manhattan's newsrooms and cramped walk-up apartments around the middle of the twentieth century. It leans on the grumpy and sunshine pairing, with one man guarded and gruff and the other open and warm. The pace is slow and the mood tender, built on quiet gestures instead of big scenes.

The tension comes from the period itself. Nick and Andy want a shared future, but the decade leaves them very little room to build one, and the book keeps that pressure in view while it lets their closeness grow.