Episode 6 of “The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual,” a novel in stories that threads together a magazine writer’s cherished past—1980s, Los Angeles—and his millennial son’s anguished determination to have his own season in the sun.
Jeffrey Leviton is a fading romantic, twice divorced, redeemed by a real, if slightly grandiose, gift for his craft. Beginning in the 1980s, a golden age of magazine publishing and unmatched freedom in Los Angeles, and continuing through the onset of Covid, Leviton grows through a harrowing crucible of circumstances—romantic chaos, alcoholic recovery, home loss, professional transition—all while attempting to anchor his son Philip’s precarious security. Meanwhile Philip, coming of age, intermittently homeless, and yearning to retrofit his existence into a generation he believes had it all, begs to experience his father’s LA, the essence of which he’s convinced lives embodied in Leviton’s eternally youthful long-time editor Bailey Kavanagh—perhaps the only woman ever to love Jeffrey Leviton.
Part family drama, part roman a clef of a lost world, the eight linked stories journey through themes of generational drift, the accelerating displacements of the 21st century, and the timelessness of young dreams.