Plays Well with Others

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.

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.

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.

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.

I simply loved this book. In addition to telling a wonderful story, Mr. Gurganus moved me deeply with (contrary to what the Kirkus reviewer said) a very unsentimental account of love, loss, caring, responsibility and growing-up. The book begins with an almost unbearably touching, yet nevertheless rioutously funny, prologue and ends with an "appendix" short-story that both allows the reader really to understand and love the protagonist and the author and offers the most encouraging and beautiful conception of "heaven" and the criteria for entrance thereto that I have ever encountered. While I hesitate to categorize "Plays Well With Others" as "gay literature," because I think it is a book to which anyone can relate and by which anyone can be enriched, I must say that it may well be the best book that could be placed in that genre that I have ever read. (Michael Cunningham's "A Home at the End of the World" presents stiff competition.) Of course, the book is about much more than "being gay," but it does present gay psychology and sexuality openly and honestly, but without overemphasizing the purely sexual aspect, as (unfortunately) too many books (e.g., Edmund White's "The Farewell Symphony) do. In all, I enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone who has a heart.