Word: gurganus
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...might I characterize my loved ones...so you won't become jaded or feel bored?" queries Allan Gurganus in his brilliant new novel, Plays Well With Others. It follows the trend of contemporary literature that includes Rent and Angels in America, in which characters have, and eventually die of, AIDS In this contribution, Gurganus offers up his characters--his loved ones--without pretense, and simply lets the reader live their experience. "I do not want to rush," he continues. "The hierarchy of suffering sets in too soon. What starts as your own self-armoring way of surviving can soon (especially...
...AIDS novel that has the titanic as a central metaphor is a bit obvious. Which is what Allan Gurganus clearly intends. Nothing about Plays Well with Others (Knopf; 353 pages; $25) is coy, demure or otherwise closeted. In fact, the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All now tells more than many readers, gay or straight, may have the patience to hear...
Plays Well's generous burden is redundancy. Like Mims, Gurganus has a native connection to North Carolina and the windy school of Southern writing. But unlike many of its more portentous graduates, he grounds catastrophe with humor. A shopping bag full of sex toys splits open on a crowded subway. A whimsical riff describes heaven as a polymorphous playground where Emily Dickinson is one of the few chaste holdouts. Elsewhere too, Gurganus puts a lot of buck-and-wing into what his fictional half calls a "Comedy of this shuffle toward the crypt...
...Allan Gurganus' popular 1989 Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is an exuberant comic novel narrated by a Southern nonagenarian. Dixie whistles through the stories Gurganus has collected for White People, although the theme of the Lost Cause is rearranged for misplaced lives. The attitudes and manners of Gurganus' characters are small-town first and Confederate second -- even third. Similarly, the author's narrators are perceptive misfits who just happen to be gay. "I've got an extra tenderness. It's not legal," is the laconic observation of one homosexual who is attracted to a pornography fan. In the story...
...When Gurganus, who studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as well as writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, reaches over the broad cultural horizon, we get the satiric sampler America Competes. The piece is an inspired and deftly arranged exchange of imaginary nut letters from folks eager to win a "National Fundament of the Arts" grant. The theme, "America, Where Have You Come From, Where Are You Bound?," is to be realized on the wall of a Washington office building. A Phoenix man thinks his father's handmade place-mat menus would be appropriate. Handicrafters from Ocala...