Transient Dancing, Gale Zoë Garnett’s follow-up novel to her much-acclaimed Visible Amazement, opens in 1995 with a brawl between the only two black men on a small Greek island. The men are Johnny Reed, an honorary Greek and former American actor of short-lived acclaim, and Theddo Daniels, president of InterAfrA, an activist organization representing African-American rights.

The roots of their tussle rest in their identities, both personal and political, and it is the formation of these identities that drives the story. This is a novel of considerable breadth, if not always depth – stories skip across years and time zones, and a wide cast of characters come alive in a relatively short space through Garnett’s frequent use of dynamic, natural-sounding dialogue. If there is little space for copious introspection, both protagonists are granted complete lives. These lives are disclosed in settings ranging from small towns in North Carolina and Sweden, to more bustling locales such as New York City, Washington D.C., Stockholm, and Hollywood.

Readers won’t find a lot of high literary style here; Garnett’s characters have lived large and long and have tales that beg the telling. It is hard not to be swept along with their stories, even if the tone and content occasionally degenerate into movie-of-the-week sentiments. Like any weekly televised pageant, Garnett knows how to strike emotional chords, but does so without hand-wringing or melodrama for the most part.

Particularly moving is Theddo’s lifelong plight and pleasure, an unlikely, lasting love affair with a young, Swedish, male dancer. The momentum of this (mostly closeted) love and the courage of Theddo’s convictions come to life in full and forceful detail – in the complete text of a speech he delivers at a conference and in descriptions of his lover’s lithe dancing form. In Theddo, Garnett has corralled all of life’s messy emotional and moral quandaries into one conflicted soul, an admirable feat and the novel’s greatest achievement.