The path to love doesn’t always travel in a straight direction. Waiting for Something Else tells the story of James, a heterosexual man who unexpectedly falls in love—but not quite in lust—with his gay co-worker, Roger.

 “Martin Cloutier’s prose is suffused with intelligence, wit, compassion, and a vision of the world uniquely his own but which also speaks to a potentially wide readership. This writer is on the cusp of an impressive literary career.”

            —Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

“Martin Cloutier understands that comedy — the searing, real kind — begins in an honesty as painful for the reader as for the author. We laugh when we read his work because we hear, fatally, the accents of our own abjection as it encounters the humiliations of daily life.”

            —Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story

Bald, bewildered, and Buddhist, James is struggling to adjust to life in New York City. Nine months into managing a Brooklyn gourmet restaurant, he’s still friendless and dateless, and secretly pining for Sherry—a Wiccan vixen with a narcissistic streak—but too timid to act. One drunken night, while confessing his unrequited love to Roger, a playwright known for sex comedies, James unwittingly stumbles into one of his own when Roger makes a move on him.

Roger, weary of sculptured thighs, pecs, and the superficial chicken parts of gay dating, is drawn to James’s awkward sincerity—and his knack for puppet animation. James enjoys the ego-stroking attention of Roger’s sexual advances, and envies his ability to make art in off-Broadway Brooklyn, but remains unsold on his hairy chest, prominent jaw, and unavoidable penis. Things become even more complicated when Sherry, escaping her bipolar boyfriend, moves in with Roger—only to catch feelings after a drunken night sharing his bed.  

In this era of shifting identities, sexual fluidity, and the messy modern search for connection, Waiting for Something Else tackles the complexities of attraction—the fine lines between gay, straight and questioning—exploring whether desire can transcend sexual orientation and our personal expectations.

“Waiting for Something Else is a brilliant comedy of manners about erotic confusion, artistic ambition, and the eternal search for connection. It is also extraordinarily funny. Martin Cloutier writes about the world of high cuisine and low behavior with sensual precision and piercing wit. This is a serious novel that never takes itself too seriously, one brave enough to parse the meaning of blowjobs even as it plumbs the mysteries of the heart.”

—Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World 

“This novel is as charming, bawdy, eloquent, and purely pleasurable as any romantic comedy could be. Its characters inhabit their hapless fates in unrequited lust and love with humor and wit. Beneath the comic contemporary surface — 21st century New York cynics, servers, actors, artists, waiters, chefs, drinkers, lovers — runs the deeply philosophical and muddled inquiry into the nature of love. One yearns, as in a Jane Austen novel, for the true linking of souls beyond the restrictive conventions of culture. Waiting for Something Else most definitely delivers.”

—Antonya Nelson, author of Female Trouble  

“Waiting for Something Else is about the big things—love and sexuality and faith and food—and it’s written with humor and verve, and with a keen sense of the restaurant world. It held me in its claws from start to finish. It’s a wonderful book.”

—Joshua Henkin, author of Morningside Heights