Customer Reviews

Plays Well with Others

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If American literature of the last decade were a color, it would probably be medium gray, with silver and tan highlights. If it were music, it would be minimalist. Authors' voices are missing or consciously disengaged. Then along comes Allan Gurganus who, in "Plays Well With Others," puts the AIDS crisis and New York art scene of the 80s on paper as no one ever has, or will ever have to again. His colors are primary; his soundtrack is Mahler; his rage is heartbreaking and wildly funny. If you don't like getting involved in the characters' lives, stay away from this wonderful book. If, however, you revel in the use of language for its own sake, in raunchy humor and sexual exploits, in characters who jump off the page and into your brain even after you have put the book down, then this one is for you. Gurganus has Robert, the central character, accuse Hartley, the narrator and Gurganus' voice, of only ever wanting a Thank You from life. Well, Mr. Gurganus, thank you.

I was really excited that a new novel had been written by the author of OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW. Maybe I anticipated too much, but no way does this book live up to its predecessor. WIDOW brought me into the world of the American South and helped me to understand so much of the experiences of the people who lived through the Civil War and of the mind set of their descendents. PLAYS WELL talked about the New York art scene of the 1980's, but I always felt like Gurganus was treating me like an outsider who could never really understand what it was like. There were some amazingly touching scenes (such as when the narrator first notices his friend's telltale "spot") that serve to remind us of the level of writing Gurganus is capable of achieving, but those moments are way too few for me to recommend this book.

What this book reminded me of was the song "Lady in Red" by Chris Deburgh. I understand the song was written in about 30 minutes - like a quick sketch - so it retained all the immediacy of someone who was writing down impressions and feelings while they were still fresh. Then he presented them unedited with all the immediacy intact. It may not have been the best song ever written, but it touched a chord because the emotions were so raw, and the feelings were so sincere.

"Plays Well with Others" is very obviously a not very well-camouflaged autobiographical tribute to the author's friends, who lived in pre-AIDS New York during a time period the author refers to as "Before", then died there of the "plague". The writing is rough, and these friends are idealized to the point where you seriously doubt they were as clever, talented and unique as the author depicted them, but the emotions are very real, and the author is trying to describe people striving for a creative life and are at the very verge of great things, when they are all cut down by the sudden, unexpected and very deadly onset of AIDS.

The important things are the emotions and the pain. Part of the beauty of his writing style in this book is the spontaneous feel you get from it. You feel as though you're really reading a story written by someone who experienced all the pain of watching his friends die one by one until his only relief came from knowing they were finally all gone and he had no more friends to lose. That same sense of immediacy is there to remind you that someone real is mourning people who were real. And their deaths were a loss and a tragedy, not only to the author. They represent all the people who died, and are dying now. They were loved and cherished and had great plans to do great things. Instead of doing those great things, they left behind one good friend to clean up the mess, usher in their grieving parents, and write a book so they wouldn't be forgotten.

It's almost diary-like in the way he wrote it. Approach it like you're reading someone's diary, and you'll be more forgiving than some of the reviewers who focused on the book as "fiction" and expected it to read like Gurganus' other great novel, "Confederate Widow". It's nothing like the first book. Please don't compare them. And when you read it, presume there is real grief behind the words - I see it there, anyway.

Just read it as the tribute it is, and use it as a means through which you might understand what all it was like, for one person at least.

I bought this book five years ago with the intention of reading it on a transatlantic flight... well ..When I reached the chapter "Thirty Dildoes" I felt compelled to thumb the pages very quickly as there was a rather prudish lady sat next to me. I judged by the amount of seat squirming that she did not approve of the content of my novel. I quickly popped it back into my carry on bag and read the inflight magazine instead. I forgot about the book until a few weeks ago, when I was looking for something to take away the tedium of a rail journey. I read on, unabashed this time and was delighted by this wonderful narrative. The author's ability to capture the 1980's New York's village lifestyle had me enthralled. The characters were beautifully written "fleshed out " in word. I slowly became friends with Hartley, Robert and Angie and their menagerie of artsy friends. The book is written through Hartley's eyes and as a writer himself he gives us a very endearing account of Grenwich village as a bohemian melting pot of colourful writers, musicians and artists. I particularly enjoyed the witty account of Hartley's first encounter with Angie at the clap clinic. It was a perfect piece of writing where Hartley studies this woman who monopolises the only available public phone. She is unaware that she is being studied while doodling on a wall and using this clinic hallway as if it were her office. This novel gave me a taste of a life I would love to have lived myself had I the resources and the courage to do so at the time. For all you other Hartley wannabes...give this book a chance. It's very amusing yet still manages to deal with the subject of the AIDS pandemic with dignity without being too preachy. I'm glad that I gave this book a second chance and will definately revisit these friends again and again. If you do enjoy it then look out for Felice Picano's "Like people in history". It has been referred to as the gay "Gone with the wind". If you do not enjoy Picanno's book ( and fall in love with Matt Loguidice)you must lack a soul!!

"Plays Well with Others" portrays a group of young artists transplanted to New York City, desperately seeking fame and fortune, only to have their careers and lives interrupted by the onset of AIDS. The lead character, Hartley Mims, arrives in 1980; an aspiring writer from North Carolina, he reminds the reader of--well, of Allan Gurganus. Fifteen years later, Hartley writes "The Voyage As I Saw It," about his years in New York and the many friends he lost to "the plague," and the resulting "memoir" makes up the entirety of "Plays Well with Others."

Two other friends--the pretty-boy, wannabe composer Robert Gustafson, and the tomboyish, wannabe artist Angie (Alabama) Byrnes--round out a trio of bohemians in the West Village. Just how much of the biographical detail is truly autobiographical is left to the reader's imagination, but there are many obvious events from Gurganus's life that make their way into the novel and one suspects that this is as much a heartfelt tribute as it is a work of fiction.

Composed as a series of vignettes (told more or less linearly), the prose is impressionistic, filled with sentence fragments, puns, catty asides, inverted clauses. When Gurganus is good, he's astonishing: one of the most brilliant chapters recounts the visit of Hartley's parents to his friends' hangout, where his embittered father shatters the joviality with one well-timed sentence. Likewise, the reader experiences the satisfaction of being published for the first time, the torment of waiting for HIV results, the moment when Hartley notices a telltale spot on Robert's arm.

Yet, every so often, what is paraded as oh-so-clever authentic vernacular strikes the reader as just-too-cute authorial affectation: "Each of us tried on personae like cheap and brilliant store-bought ascots, sometimes a few a day." "So, being unrequited love, it was never solitude, more socialism." "Do I idealize our early idealism?" Similarly, Gurganus's metaphors for AIDS (the sinking of the Titanic, the state of his address book) are initially shrewd and appropriate but eventually exasperating and overwrought. The author just doesn't know where to stop.

Even his portrayals are more than a little unreal. Robert is repeatedly and cloyingly described, in one form or another, as "the prettiest boy in New York of his decade." (Trust me: there is, and has never been, such a person. Beauty in this town lasts about five minutes; then the crowd is on to someone else.) It's hard to tell just how seriously Gurganus means this incessant flatter patter. Late in the book, he seems to apologize: "by now, you're probably so sick of hearing the exact color of his pale eyelashes." Even the fictional Robert scolds Hartley's/Allan's literary excesses: "Your weakness is this hero worship. Gets in the ways of your characters' seeming real." Exactly. But Gurganus's self-awareness of the ludicrousness of this portrait doesn't excuse it. And, finally, the cameos by two other friends (Gideon and Marco) are so emphatically defined by their ethnicities that they are little more than tokens, in the worst sense of the word.

These faults mar what is otherwise a compelling, funny, witty, emotional, even sentimental (but rarely manipulative) ode to the West Village in the 1980s. Some readers may find the book's "cuteness" less grating than I did, but I do think that a little less self-absorption would have shown Gurganus on top (rather than over the top) of his game.

This was a very hard story to tell and it is masterfully done. The time frame is the almost holocaust-like period in America when AIDS was considered the "curse". It must have been very difficult to abstract all the events and feelings into print form. He truely wrote without a net. His story jostled my memories of the same period where all my college compatriots went off to NYC and were later shipped home in red plastic bags. Embalming and church burials were out of the question. Try telling your story. The only fault is the lack of the authors telling us how this really affected him. He told almost too much though. Well Done.

After reading one dreadful gay-themed novel after another, all of which seem to be on either a quasi-Lolita theme or "wacky and biting" drag queen humor, at last here's one for the grown-ups. Plays Well With Others is spectacularly written, fearlessly plotted, and, oh yeah, hysterical and sad, too.

I'll admit, my heart sank a bit on reading the blurb ("Here we go again with another AIDS memoir"). Callous as that feeling was, Gurganus still manages to take well-tread ground and make it seem like the first time you've heard it. I didn't want to stop reading, especially after I had laughed out loud at the first ten pages (It involves a specific number of dildoes and has to be read to be believed). The book continues in that vein, finally culminating in a short story about angels that's one of the best short sections of writing put to paper since "Pafko At The Wall."

I've already bought this book as a gift twice, and I can't recommend i! t any higher that that.

What works best about Allan Gurganus's La Boheme-like book about the AIDS crisis during the 1980's is its description of the friendship of three persons newly transplanted to New York. The narrator, Hartley Mims, a nascent writer from North Carolina, also becomes a caregiver to Robert Gustafson, originally from Iowa, who is the most beautiful man ever to grace the streets of Greenwich Village. Robert is also an extremely gifted composer. One of my favorite parts of the book is its presentation of the New York debut of Robert's unfinished opus, "Titanic," with Aaron Copeland serving as the conductor. A friend to both Hartley and to Robert, is Angela "Alabama" Byrnes, a very Janis Joplin-ish painter, who does everything in life in a big, brassy way.

Angela, Robert, and Hartley form a bond and a love for one another that goes beyond simple friendship. Besides supporting one another in their struggles to find fame and fortune in their newly adopted art world, they become soul mates. One scene in the book has them cuddling together naked, in Robert's bed, which I can only describe as poignant and, in the context of it, also rather heartbreaking.

Written in an episodic way, rather than in a smooth narrative, Gurganus does not always succeed in maintaining the necessary tension to move the story along. His writing style often blunts the impact of its tragic theme and my feelings for the characters. Robert and Angie appear as character types rather than as flesh and blood people. I wish I could have cared for them more. I was concerned for their plights, but found it impossible to really love them. Probably at least partially autobiographical, I got to know Hartley much better than Robert and Angie, but Hartley spends an inordinate amount of time whining about how his father misunderstood and maltreated him. Gurganus's writing style was occasionally torturous and overly metaphorical. An obvious example is Robert's "Titanic Symphony," where the author compares the hubris and fate of many of those who partook in the sexual revolution of the 1970's with those who built and marketed the infamous ship as unsinkable and indestructible. A story in the novel's appendix, written by Hartley, about newly arrived angels in heaven has a certain amount of charm and humor, but is way over the top in its sentimentality.

_Plays Well with Others_ is a good, and often sweet book that I can recommend, if not necessarily as whole-heartedly as I would have hoped.

This was my first Gurganus novel. I absolutely adored it. It makes me want to read all of his work. There's nothing I love better than a well-written novel which engrosses me completely. I read Plays Well With Others over the course of about 48 hours. I would have read it faster but I work, have a husband and a toddler.

Fundamental religious types will definitely object to the homosexual themes. However, I found the incident with the dildoes both screamingly funny and heart-breaking. (As did my 69-year-old mother.)

Having spent time in the New York City arts community during the 80s, Gurganus makes me yearn for my past. He also sensitively depicts the atmosphere of fear and paranoia during the early AIDS years.

If the rest of his books are as good as this one, I will be a very happy woman.

I read this book at the recommendation of a friend, and I now recommend it to many of MY friends. It's artfully crafted, deeply touching, and thoroughly moving.

One caveat: Don't be to quick to judge when you start this book. After the opening salvo, the story hangs a bit while the characters get going. Also, the dialogue is at times a bit "precious" and too full of self-absorbed banter. This is, I'm sure, quite intentional. I just wish it didn't tax my patience.

Overall, a book that will touch the deepest parts of you and will stand up to repeated readings.