Teddy's Version illuminates an unlikely, decades-long, mid-twentieth-century friendship between two political scientists, their relationship and their times, revealed by the titular character as he recalls discursive conversations between the men. Teddy's best friend and interlocutor, Chaim Mermelstein, is a hulking, guarded, heterosexual, a single father, Jewish, an orphan of the Second World War, his American name, Charlie Parker. Tadeuz Teddy Falenski is his colleague's opposite: slender, charming, fond of recreational drugs, a polymath with a passion for photography, from Poland by way of England. A closeted homosexual, Teddy's bifurcated existence is divided between a public eligible bachelor persona and his hidden gay life. For the duration of their long friendship, the topic of Teddy's homosexuality remains undiscussed between two men, leaving open the question Chaim's awareness of Teddy's sexual proclivity. Whether sitting on the deck of Teddy's tumbledown floating home, The Étude, or walking the beach near Chaim's house in Venice, CA, or cruising the freeways, or taking lunches at their regular table in The Annapurna, an Indian strip mall restaurant, conversations leap from topic to topic: their specialty, the Communist Bloc; Chaim's unbalanced American wife; his rebellious musician daughter; Teddy's passion for photography; Chaim's avocation as a writer of screenplays...and on occasion to a man named Wolf, an opaque character whom Chaim has known since they were both young men in Vilnius, who may be alive and living in Los Angeles, and may have had a hand in the death of Chaim's brother in the ghetto. Teddy's Version begins at the end, in the 1980's, with the revelation that Teddy has contracted a mysterious, undiagnosed illness that initially presents as a sore throat and a rash. Other characters insinuate themselves into the novel with first-person asides to the reader on their relationship with Chaim Mermelstein, adding their brushstrokes to Teddy's in painting a Cubistic portrait of Chaim, who never speaks directly to the reader.