I really like this book and while not catholic I'm close enough that the experiences and decisions of the characters are comprehensible to me, which probably helps.

The article mentions this briefly but many don't, and they downplay it significantly even here. The first act of this book is extremely homoerotic. Like it is a clear depiction of a chaste but certainly romantic love between these two young men. But it is also a friendship based on normal-for-the-time-and-place male camaraderie and college antics.

It's a nuanced and sophisticated depiction, not apparently trying to make any moral or ethical point about it and the book has a small but devoted following among contemporary gay men for this. Nor is this even plausibly deniable as a "sappho and her friend" type accident on the author's part, since homosexuality is pretty explicitly (though euphemistically) referenced elsewhere in the book. IMO one of the best depictions of a romance of its kind in modern literature. It's fascinating that it's here.