Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger

His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars. This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. stainless-steel silos-are silhouetted behind him in the setting sun. Two of his Starship rockets-gleaming, pointy-nosed, 160-ft. It’s a warm, windy December day at Starbase, his new rocket-fabrication and launch facility at the southern tip of Texas. Straights may nod off.“Sometimes I do hit some resonant notes with respect to humor,” Musk says of his puerile expressions. Once there, can he get Craig away from Clayton? Gaily self-amused, told in tart memos, cheeky checklists, sighs, essays, legal briefs, and heartsick journal entries. Can Brigadoon be reborn? So Travis leaves Gordo and heads for Saratoga Springs.

Both Travis and Craig have full lives, but Travis, sigh, finds something missing. Craig, meanwhile, has a law partnership with fellow Harvard grad Charleen Webb in Saratoga Springs, New York, wants to organize a teensy Freedom to Marry March on Washington, and loves Clayton Bergman, who runs a hardware business, gives Craig a platinum wedding ring-and they're together 12 years. Though in Splitsville, Gordo and Travis live together, albeit in separate parts of the house. He has also spent years rooming with his old Beckley roommate Gordon Dubois, who's now a screenwriter for Argosy Entertainment, sort of, and begins scripting this very novel. In 1998, Travis is teaching American History at the University of Southern California he requires all of his jocks' student essays to relate to sports figures, and, meanwhile, tries to get a grant to write a book, Alexander Hamilton and the Designated Hitter. The two go off to colleges on opposite coasts and lose track of each other. Craig prefers Tony stabbing women in the shower.

Craig is a sports star with a body to die for while Travis obsesses over Broadway musicals and collects every cast recording ever made, once even cutting classes and hiking 300 miles to buy a used LP of Greenwillow with Tony Perkins in a singing role. In 1978, Travis Puckett and all-star quarterback and shortstop Craig McKenna fall for each other at Beckley School in Tarrytown, New York, but ignore and put each other off until, well, all resistance fades and they kiss on a rainy day under a viaduct and then spend hours in each other's arms. By the author of the well-received baseball novel The Last Days of Summer (1998).

Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger