Word: hartley
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...that Plays Well With Others has to be depressing: death is only how the story ends. As the literature of this emerging genre insists, the characters are far more important than the fate that eventually befalls them. The novel's first character is the narrator, writer Hartley Mims, jr., who chooses to spell junior "with a lowercase letter because it's quirky and who "planned on becoming a New Yorker when [he] was eight." His story begins when he moves to the Big Apple from Falls, North Carolina in 1980 to pursue a career as a bona fide starving artist...
...Hartley meets composer Robert Christian Gustafson in an elevator after a dismal job interview and falls instantly in love with him. Star-struck Hartley sees him as one of the city's "miraculous" people who can walk down any street in Manhattan and greet by name the street-cleaner, the woman at the corner grocery store and any number of vaguely familiar people in limousines. "I've been in New York for five whole years, going on a century," he explains. New York evidently also knows him: with silver eyelashes and gorgeous Nordic hair, Robert is New York's "Prettiest...
Five-foot-tall painter Angelina Byrnes completes Hartley's endearing circle of friends. He meets her, of all places, at the VD clinic, and she soon draws in him and Robert with her sparkling intelligence and inspired nine-foot-high paintings. Angie, like Hartley and unlike Robert, works first and plays second. Eccentric and ambitious, she saws holes in her apartment so she can slide her enormous paintings through the floor when they don't fit in doorways, calls friends at 3 a.m. to borrow blue paint and dreams of seeing her work in the lobby of the Museum...
...Richard Hartley Mims Jr., the novel's HIV-negative narrator, can't stop prematurely expostulating about his talented Greenwich Village friends who began dying from AIDS in the early '80s. Robert, an Iowa Adonis, squeezes a legendary social life and the completion of an epic symphony inspired by the Titanic into two blazing years. Angie, a part-time waitress, cracks the art world with large, spirited canvases and the smarts to know that even a gifted girl has to hustle. Mims' own promising career as a writer is detoured by home-nursing the stricken. His key ring, he notes with...
Holland does acknowledge a few consistent sources of inspiration in contemporary cinema--Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Gus Van Sant, and "in Europe, just tons of them"--but the voice she is most interested in following...