Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love takes place during the first year of the Reagan era. Jon “Duke” Wain, a charmed 18-year-old growing up in Meyerland, Houston’s enormous Jewish neighborhood, finds a companion for drinking, drugs, and living wildly in Manolo Salazar, his gay best friend, who has grown up in Hispanic Gulfgate, heir to his own father’s evangelical ministry. On a Saturday night in September in 1981, the night Nolan Ryan pitches his record fifth no-hitter at the Astrodome, the two scions light out for Galveston Island intent on heading down the Texas coastline and not returning home. Binging among dangerous revelers, Duke meets Caroline Cahill, a haunting young woman who turns out to be a runaway from West Texas. Confronted at the threshold of life and fate, Duke wonders if Caroline Cahill’s story is the route to putting his birthright behind him. The answer will change his life. Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love is about the tensions between ambition and faith, duty and desire, art and life—and about those whose lives must live with the consequences of choosing one over the other.
