Terre Haute April 15, 2007

Edmund White's 'Terre Haute' is set in a high-security federal prison on death row. A young man based on Timothy McVeigh, is about to be executed for blowing up a public building in Oklahoma. A older man, based on Gore Vidal, is attracted to the young man and to some degree sympathies with his quarrel against the government, though he is appalled by the form of protest, the shedding of innocent blood. These men are different in every way. One is gay and the other a virginal heterosexual. Sexual tension and the conflict between political conviction and personal remorse result in an utterly unexpected form of intimacy between the two men.