Over the course of a late-night supper in a little restaurant in Toronto’s Yorkville district, Peter Lindley finds himself recounting his personal history to a mostly silent dinner companion, trying to give a sense of the patterns of love, longing, and loss that have marked his life as a gay man. Lindley, a former professor and now a publicist at the Stratford Festival, offers a picture history of his gay life, from the heady passions of a magical first love in smalltown Ontario in the late 1940s to the soul-wrenching depths of an unrequited love at Oxford in the ’50s.

Lindley guides his listener through an erotically charged, and very politically incorrect, tryst with a student at a university in the 1960s; offers glimpses of wild romps through the ’70s with a young man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Caravaggio’s Bacchus, and ends his story by taking his companion back through the evening in the early ’80s that they’ve just shared.

What’s Remembered is a rather old-fashioned novel that thoughtfully and with great emotional resonance offers contemporary readers a picture of four decades of gay life in Canada. It also captures that universal search that we all get tangled up in, gay or straight, for love and longtime companionship. Arthur Motyer’s choice to set the novel at the very edge of the impending AIDS chasm rather than in the midst of the crisis allows him to reflect on what it means to be gay without having to grapple with safe-sex issues and to concentrate on what, for him, are the greater questions: How do you live a double life, a life inside and outside the closet? Why does being gay mean being different?

Motyer’s narrative is full to the brim with questions, reflections, and analysis of a world now gone. This world exists only in memories and Motyer’s stately, carefully measured prose that mirrors Lindley’s lifelong search for meaning. The reader will occasionally long for Lindley’s erstwhile dinner companion to wrest the narrative out of his hands, to jump into this one-sided conversation and tell his story and share his experiences, but What’s Remembered remains a quietly captivating first novel that offers a unique look into gay history through the eyes of a most thoughtful and philosophical narrator.