A fierce elegy in mosaic, this final entry in Mengay's Eldorado Trilogy (after Ojo) contemplates love, loss, art, sex, and "those dismal and dispiriting realizations that your country was run by a government of bigots." Bare Life continues the story of twins Jake and Wren, introduced in The Lede to Our Undoing, in New York City and the small Western town of Eldorado, where in the present a nephew faces life after they're gone-and questions of what to do with the "letters, journals, sketchbooks, canvases" left behind now that the world-and the art market-has embraced Jake's work posthumously. Mengay adopts a range of voices and perspectives to fill out these lives, offering spirited accounts of art-world scandals and disappointments "at the height of the panic about the 'gay disease'"; raucous and incisive discussions of religion and power and life in what one character calls "Puritania"; a bracing set piece of chapters in the voice of a young Russian man falling for the older Jacob; and much more.Surprise abounds as Mengay surveys lives and eras, blending a ruminative mode with bursts of stellar comedy-Jake's future husband, Tommy, facing a polygraph test to land a big New York job is delightful-and outrage at bigots' refusal to be consigned to history. Of course, apocalyptic denunciations of Jake's unapologetically queer art and life, like a senator and a reactionary newspaper labeling "the work and me dangerous, a threat to society," only "helped skyrocket the auction price."Mengay links such last-century scandals both to the present, through "the bigots' bannerman, Crumm", who has a tower on 5th Avenue, and also to the reign of Stalin, through moving excerpts from a family memoir. Time is fluid here, as past and present, legacy and self-invention, all burn with urgent power, and readers must work to keep up, but Bare Life yields continual pleasures, insights, and illuminations, in prose of rare precision.--Booklife