Elise and Viri have settled into a warm, loving domesticity, although Elise’s anxiety has shaped the course of her life and created challenges for both her and her partner. When her high school ex Lily calls with shocking news, she’s forced to reckon with unresolved feelings from her youth—and to envision hope for the future.
Charming and heartbreaking, Soph Tang’s DECADENCE is an intimate story about adults coming to terms with feelings they’ve borne since youth. An early scene with a therapist foregrounds this focus on emotion, and that theme feels right for the queer millennial cast. More than once a character chides, “Use your adult words,” both acknowledging the difficulty of articulating emotion and challenging someone to do so. Communication is a central, visible element of the book; text message threads appear frequently on the page, with slang and abbreviations that once again feel spot-on for the queer millennial characters. This thematic spectrum ties DECADENCE together—feeling emotion, recognizing and naming it, communicating it to others, all the way to talk therapy (which explicitly processes emotion through communication). These actions are clearly and recognizably portrayed throughout the text. Conversely, there remains an intense awareness of the impenetrable interior lives of others. When Elise sees Lily ill, it feels “like peeking behind the curtain, like seeing an actor off-set, without the facade of their character”—a moment of sharp understanding that the emotional self is constantly mediated through some type of performance, be it obfuscation or honest communication.
This may feel abstract or heady, but DECADENCE also feels down-to-earth and relatable. Many of its most effective and affecting moments are simple, plain acts of love and care. Since several of the characters haven’t seen one another since high school, the story is often suffused with the intimacy and intensity of sheer physical presence. “Showing up” for people is a crucial idea—sometimes with snacks, sometimes with a hug, sometimes merely to exist in a space together. These scenes make passionate, epic, novel-worthy love feel real, meaningful, and attainable.
There’s a lot to appreciate in DECADENCE, but it’s these heartfelt, human moments—where the immensity of an emotion and the paucity of a gesture feel both comic and tragic—that will stick with readers most.
Soph Tang’s DECADENCE is a funny, haunting, and relatable queer love story.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader