Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
This is not to say 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...
...novel itself is divided into four sections: "Prologue," "Before," "After," and "After After." "Prologue" reads more like a epilogue; everything else that follows is flashback. "Before" details the characters' lives before AIDS, of course, and "After" chronicles what happens after the disease strikes. "After After" catches the story up to the prologue--it is the dirge. The book is further sectioned into chapters with clever Flannery O'Connor-esque titles like "On Feeling New" and "How Shall We Mainly Live? Who to Mostly...
...starts with those tedious lay ups at the MAC. Such dedication is novel to Harvard basketball, and is both the cause and effect of success...
None, of course. Unless you can find cold comfort in cold cash. Which is why a sardonic God invented negligence lawyers. Russell Banks, author of the novel from which Atom Egoyan derived The Sweet Hereafter, has, however, improved on His handiwork, creating in Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) a man who chases settlements with a chills-and-fever passion that can be explained not by greed but by the suppurating wounds life has inflicted on him. The man, whom Holm plays with superbly controlled fanaticism, wants compensation from an unfair universe but finds momentary relief in squeezing more readily available targets...