Casey McQuiston’s The Pairing is a Feast for the Senses and the Feels
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to experience a brilliant chef’s curated tasting menu, there’s a moment somewhere in the middle of a dozen-plus lavish, inventive courses in which you might turn to your dining companion, blurt out an expletive around whatever mind-blowingly delightful bite you’ve just consumed, and say, “This is going to be one of the best meals we’ve ever had.” That same moment comes partway through The Pairing, Casey McQuiston’s maximalist ode to decadence and travel and self-(re)discovery and self-described slutty bisexuals in love: This wrenching romance is the ultimate summer read and their very best work yet.
Like a dinner where you’ve splurged on the wine pairing for the complete effect, you will feel impossibly full after reading: full of emotion (with tears leaking out), full of queer joy (where the conflict doesn’t have to be about transition or trauma), full of the need to hop on Google Flights and recreate the all-you-can-eat France/Spain/Italy itinerary immediately.
What a dreamy trip it is: bisexual exes (and lifelong friends, until they weren’t) Theo Flowerday and Kit Fairfield booked this Eurofeast of the senses back when they were still together, only to break up before the first stop. Four years later, with their travel vouchers about to expire, each decides to redeem the failed voyage, never anticipating that the other would have the exact same thought. And so, packed together like sardines into a tour bus for three weeks, they must coexist despite being virtual strangers to one another, all while still hefting plenty of shared baggage. To ameliorate their emotional discomfort and sublimate their unflagging attraction, they come up with a cheeky bet: compete to see who can sleep with more locals on the tour. This, of course, will end fabulously.
It is so deliciously high-concept, in some ways more so than McQuiston’s previous adult romances, which is saying a lot: a chef pâtissier/sommelier pairing to rival the First Son/Spare Prince dynamic in Red, White & Royal Blue, while a meticulously detailed Eurotrip route has more stops than the time-traveling Q train of One Last Stop. Perhaps it’s because The Pairing is juggling so many different tones and vibes, packed full of hedonism yet just as unflinchingly plumbing emotional depths. A tour through McQuiston’s Instagram and Substack will reveal how they have inhabited these characters on a cellular level for the past several years, having planned out every last item in their respective backpacks and curating 50-song playlists tracking their complicated emotional arcs from Cinque Terre to Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
Yet all of that is on the page as well, with every sense accounted for: the feel of the linen shirt against Theo’s neck in the heat, the sight of centuries of art and architecture to feed the mind as well as the stomach, the smells of a seafood market run by a competently hot local fishmonger, the sounds of a kitchen—whether a restaurant or a nonna’s home—as a meal comes together. And the tastes. The taste of heartbreak and failure as Kit and Theo rebuild their lives and discover how to survive alone after spending their formative years growing together as neighbors and roommates and lovers. The competing tastes of emotional self-denial contrasted with the complete abandon with which they descend upon wine tastings (and, hey, if there’s a cute farmhand hefting grapes in the vineyard, then all the better) and rustic meals. The tastes of… well, this is a very horny book, suffice to say, so there is much local fare to be sampled.
Don’t let the horniness fool you, though. McQuiston has put so much consideration into embracing, rather than recoiling from, various stereotypes about bisexuals being sluts who “can’t” choose. In actuality, every notch in their respective hotel bedposts are deliberate choices, whether processing complicated desires or trying to reach out to one another through someone else’s warm body. Despite plenty of thorny emotions when each of them sees (or hears, hoo boy) the other with another partner, it’s not depicted as the heteronormative “betrayal” of sleeping with someone else. Theo and Kit’s love for one another—a love that has to be filtered through dozens of languages and contexts—is never under threat. It’s the greater question of if the people they are now can find their way back to each other, if either of their fatal flaws will trip things up again or if they can learn from their failed relationship. But here, on this decadent tour? It’s all about reveling in physical pleasures, including witnessing each other’s gratification. Their sexual dynamics are about control, about creativity, about improvisation. In short, they fuck like they cook.
McQuiston subverts the genre-typical dual-perspective structure; instead of alternating chapters, we get the entire first half of the book from Theo’s point of view. And at the crucial point in which the story switches over to Kit… it’s breathtaking. You will feel the dull pang of missing Theo’s voice, especially as they are one of the most compelling contemporary romance narrators I’ve read in some time. But a running joke in the book proves true: Kit picking up the latter half of their entwined tale already feels familiar, because in so many ways these two are so damn similar. It’s right there on the cover, as they consistently show up at each stop wearing roughly the same outfit; but also, it’s often difficult to parse where one ends and the other begins. In a tasting menu, the interplay of food and drink often makes it so that you can’t separate which was more of the standout; only together do they complete the vision. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the (other) game with which Kit and Theo fill their downtime: one proposes an ingredient, the other counters with a dish or drink, the first pulls out the next ingredient to “yes-and” a new pairing—riffing in an epicurean ouroboros, daydreaming not just about a truly excellent-sounding meal but actually (re)building their future together, dish by dish, drink by drink.
In some ways, I feel as if I haven’t said enough about this book, in other ways I’ve said too much. As with offering gastronomical recommendations to someone visiting the same foreign cities I’ve just left, I can only share my experience and guess that your reaction might be somewhat similar. But invariably you will get something different out of it than I did; you may push yourself back from the table laughing where I cried over the final pages. Thoughtfully considered and technically accomplished, The Pairing is a culinary and romantic masterpiece.
The Pairing is available now wherever books are sold.